DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3hr 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
20hr 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
3d 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
4d 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
5d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
12d 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
12d 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).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
12d ago
Xi purges a former ally, so he can't be accused of favouritism
Mandatory Han Feizi on the techniques of the ruler:
The Yellow Emperor said: “A hundred battles a day are fought between the superior and his underlings.” The underlings conceal their selfish [interests], trying to test their superior; the superior employs gauges and measures to restrict the underlings. Hence when gauges and measures are established, they are the sovereign’s treasure; when the cliques and cabals are formed, they are the ministers’ treasure. If a minister does not murder his ruler, this is because the cliques and cabals are not formed yet. (Han Feizi 8.8)
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
In general, Chinese Communism seems to be more willing to tolerate ‘genuine conversion’ than Soviet Communism was. It might something to with the history of face and deference in China, I’m not sure. You see it even with the Uighurs.
I think it's more about the idea of «education». They think that people can be bent into shape so long as enough pressure is provided. This is the more humane Confucian side of the Chinese philosophy, balancing the liberal use of capital punishment. I'd like to say that Confucius would protest reeducation camps in particular, but… maybe not.
[17:22] Zi Gong asked, “Does the noble man also have things that he hates?”
Confucius said, “He does. He hates those who advertise the faults of others. He hates those who abide in lowliness and slander the great. He hates those who are bold without propriety. He hates those who are convinced of their own perfection, and closed off to anything else. How about you, what do you hate?”
Zi Gong said, “I hate those who take a little bit of clarity as wisdom; I hate those who take disobedience as courage; I hate those who take disclosing people's weak points to be straightforwardness.”
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
I really doubt that «Xi has no permanent residence in Beijing, stays in a hotel and gets ambushed» makes a lot of sense. He owns the damn place and they're obsessed with security.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
I think he might tolerate it for a time but he'll get rid of corrupt or inept allies when he no longer tactically needs them. Frankly he seems willing to get rid of pretty much anyone except Wang Huning.
A snarky, but I think mostly fair on the object level, Chinatalk episode. For extra fun: the comparison of Xi's latest purge and the US purge under Trump 2.0. Both this far have have had no effect on apparent combat readiness.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
Yes, I remember.
I mean there were shots fired in his general direction.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
I think late Mao was driven primarily not by [greater than usual] paranoia, but by a fairly reasonable belief that after his profoundly disastrous Great Leap Forward his throne grew shaky and he could only stay in power until death by getting everyone bogged down in bloody chaos, riding the tiger, so to speak. It is also likely that he genuinely believed that another round of social engineering is in order, thus «continuous revolution».
We do not see Xi acting weirdly or doing anything extravagant in any other domain. There's no tightening of censorship, no incomprehensible economic stratagems, the diplomacy is predictable and reactive, what we hear of the 15th 5-year plan is business as usual, Jack Ma is forgiven, most campaigns (against sissy men, tutoring, quantitative trading, whatever) are toned down, the recent exercises around Taiwan were roughly identical in scope and nature to the exercises in 2022, 2023, 2024. He's specifically purging the military brass, for whatever reason.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
Notably there's some history I didn't know: Xi Jinping's father was once "purged," but he wasn't executed, just removed from power for a while. He was eventually allowed to come back.
Mate, wait until he tells you what happened to Xi Jinping at the same time. And to Deng Xiaoping too.
[The more interesting part of Xi Zhongxun's purge timeline is that he's been Governor of Guangdong for two years and only then got formally exonerated.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13d ago
I find this theory the most plausible so far.
Some notes.
The first is purges of those directly tied to his political rivals, most notably the Bo Xilai faction he defeated to achieve and solidify his grip on power
It's very funny when people frame the Bo Xilai affair as «defeated to solidify his grip». Bo self-immolated. He was a populist, a comically venal character and deeply hated by the party elders (partially due to vigorous participation in the Cutural Revolution, denouncing and beating his father), his wife very likely slept with their British middleman to help send their son (at least, her son) to Harrow UK, and then flat out murdered the guy, with Bo's second-in-command defecting to the US in panic. What future could he have after that? How could Xi not «purge» him?
Likewise, another political enemy of Xi, Ling Jihua, got wrecked by his playboy son crashing to death in a Ferrari while fooling around with two girls; and the third enemy, Zhou Yongkang, took part in a coverup attempt. These cartoonish folks are the corruption that Xi has been fighting his entire career, their existence had forged his mandate to solidify power, and the reason they had power and could aspire to get more in the first place is that they were corrupt. I think many people miss this detail, but in the 00's China, there has been little distinction between «corruption» and «political advancement»; and therefore there's little difference between Xi «legitimately crushing corruption» and «solidifying his grip». His grip amounts to being the top guy in a system with meritocratic advancement biased by loyalty, he doesn't need bribery to keep it working, nor does he personally need money. But anyone who starts to siphon money out of the system, buy higher offices, sell positions downstream, and form a nontrivial personal patronage network, be that a representative of an established clique or an ambitious upstart, is a threat to Xi. And when that happens in the PLA (and it had been happening on a vast scale), it very quickly becomes an existential threat to Xi. I've been told there had been at least one semi-successful assassination attempt soon after he became Chairman; make of that what you will.
friends of Xi and allies may not have been targeted
This is a bit unfalsifiable. If they have been targeted, had they ever been his friends? Does Xi even have friends, is he the kind of person who can have friends? For what it's worth, he was the one who promoted Zhang Youxia all the way to first-ranked CMC vice chairman, and their fathers Zhang Zongxun and Xi Zhongxun (Xi respects his own father a lot) had been friends forever, as in theory were current-gen Zhang and Xi. According to Brookings, Youxia was part of Xi's inner circle! He also has already purged Qin Gang (Wolf Warrior alpha male), He Weidong and Miao Hua (Fujian clique, so theoretically Xi loyalists he had personally been promoting and relying on) and a host of other personal associates.
It's not clear to me that Xi had ever turned a blind eye to a friend's corruption or underperformance, at least I haven't seen such evidence. When people try to tie Xi personally to some corruption, they often cite his sister's riches (which he started pressing her to sell starting in 2012, apparently, and succeeded by 2014) but it seems that those were accumulated without his help and even before he became Chairman – remember, Xi is a son of a former Vice Premier, a man who had a real shot at Chairman position himself, his family is one of the most prestigious CPC bloodlines to begin with, and his siblings can capitalize on that. After looking through his family's biography and other sources, I think it's safe to say that Xi is a very severe, ideologically driven actor who just Does Not Like Corruption. There's no parallel to Putin or Maduro or whatever. I don't know why this is so hard for people to accept, we've known such autocrats in the 20th century.
That is to say one of the PLA’s leading figures and an erstwhile close Xi ally really was selling nuclear secrets to the US
I strongly doubt this part of the story. It's «Some anonymous sources cited in Western media» and «said people familiar with a high-level briefing on the allegations» type report. Journalists make it sound like they're protecting the confidentiality of their sources, but they face no punihment for straight up inventing narratives. Just because all the journalists are repeating the same news doesn't mean they have corroborating evidence, they can be (and often are) just repeating each other. I've previously investigated similar turns of phrase (with regards to tech reporting) and it turned out that the journalist had been half misinformed and half confabulating. It often means just «some Chinese person has told me that». The closest thing to a corroboration we have is that supposedly «Gu Jun, the former general manager of China National Nuclear Corp., the state-owned company that runs China’s nuclear programs, provided some of the evidence against the top general», but that can as well do with, say, falsifying reports on warhead condition as with any CIA dealings.
My reasons for doubt have little to do with this prior or with Zhang Youxia's reputation, it's just… can you imagine the risk of leaking that to Western press, in Xi's China? For what benefit, just gloating? If you're not 100% sure the MSS won't trace it back to you, it's insanity. Though, I do doubt it on the object level too. Why would a high-ranking General sell nuclear secrets to the US? Was he expecting to get out of China and enjoy the profits in Miami? The way I look at it, better appropriate $100M in the PLA and risk a humiliating expulsion and retirement than get whatever money the CIA can offer but risk being killed. This is something a disgruntled engineer can do, one who's not so thouroughly watched.
I think Zhang probably got pulled down by his protege Li Yuchao, who got purged for corruption somewhat earlier. And the official Chinese accusaton, far as we can tell, is «They have severely fueled political and corruption problems that threaten the Party's absolute leadership over the armed forces and undermine the Party's governance foundation… gravely tarnished the image and authority of the CMC leadership and severely damaged the political and ideological foundation of unity and progress among all military personnel… inflicted grave harm on efforts to strengthen political loyalty in the military, the military's political environment, and overall combat readiness, posing a serious adverse impact on the Party, the country and the military». This is largely duckspeak but I think it can be interpreted as «created a personal fief and might have been planning a coup». The coup preparation, in turn, could have been fueled by anxiety about previous misdeeds (or Li Yuchao's own corruption) catching up to him, as Xi tightens the screws. We'll probably never know what really happened; all of that may be just Xi's paranoia. Authoritarian regimes are prone to prioritize defanging the army to reduce the risk of a coup even at the cost of combat readiness.
The general was not corrupt, but represented a generation of dim or mid-witted PLA sinecures unfit for any actual major conflict with a top-tier peer power (you know the one). A legacy of a poorer, more dysfunctional, more third-world, less capable, less advanced China, he has been replaced
Whether this is the intent or not, this will be the consequence. People often concern troll about Xi's purges by pointing out how these are the last «battle-tested» officers China («hasn't fought a war since 1979») has. But what use is 1979 experience in Vietnam against the US in 2020s-2030s? They didn't even do that well in Vietnam. Generally speaking, it's better to lose wars (so long as you don't suffer major consequences) than win and promote decorated officers who have internalized lessons inapplicable to your actual existential challenges. A victory freezes the doctrine evolution. The US has been winning every battle, and what's the result now? A force that's perfect for dunking on Taliban, Iraq and Venezuela while maintainig divine K/D ratio, I guess. A force that would probably not do great in a war of attrition against an industrial superpower. Russia dunked on Ukraine in 2014, and how has that served Russia in 2022, when said Ukraine had learned the lessons of its defeat? The Chinese aren't winning or losing wars, they study American triumphs and try to adapt, so that their measures are a superset of what Americans can plausibly react to. They've invented Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare after meditating on the Gulf War, Kosovo War, Iraq war. How well can we expect an elderly veteran of the Sino-Vietnamese War to execute on such paradigms? It's probably better to start from scratch. (In fairness, there's also little reason to assume Xi is well equipped to understand and govern the modern China.)
In any case, I do not believe this substantially affects the Taiwan timeline. They are not ready by the standard implicit in their activities. They're only testing prototypes of a whole range of systems (ostensible sixth generation fighter jets, newer domestic engines on 5th gen, drone carriers etc.), the fleet is still building (years left to their first nuclear-powered carrier, it's under construction), they're seemingly not sure how to utilize robots in combat, very many things are clearly experimental and not in volume production or incorporated into standard training. Politically, they also hope the KMT administration (likely to win the next elections) will be more friendly and cooperate without the need for violence. Peaceful – if coerced – reunification is still the preferred outcome, and it is unwise to assume they have given up on that (or even that it is wholly impossible, especially given Trump).
That said, the popular theory that Zhang was the cool head against Xi's mad desire to flood Taiwan with meat waves of recruits reads like cope. Where do you all get this idea of different actors' personal dispositions with regard to Taiwan? More «anonymous sources»? Where does the idea about Xi's «hare-brained» schemes come from? If it happens, it will be a high-tech, highly automated, materiel-heavy war quite unlike historical amphibious invasions. Why would China not play to its strenghs and instead LARP as Americans on D-Day? They seem intent to solve as much as possible with pure industrial capacity, because that's what they have in spades. For example, let me present you: medium cargo ship outfitted with containerized AESA radar, CIWS, VLS cells and EMALS. How does their naval doctrine look like at this point? I don't think even they are sure.
In short it is plausible that Xi is just consolidating power or acting on paranoia, but I think these purges are not a big deal, despite the apparent high profile of victims.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
15d ago
Does the fact that nobody goes to the Church have any impact on your glib judgement?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
15d ago
Sorry, you are not a foremost expert of what do I know. I actually know personally quite a few Russians and talk to them regularly (at least once a week, often more). And of course, I read a lot of what was written about Soviet intelligentsia in 70s-90s
Sorry, all this snark is uninteresting. If that's the impression you're getting from your contacts, you are in a bubble, like many emigres. We're not in the 70s nor the 90s. As of 2020s, roughly 1% of the Russian population is Christian enough to bother taking part in the Christmas service, vs 47% of Americans. Churches in Russia are empty and subsist on government dime. American Christians also have coherent beliefs about, say, the Third Temple — a condition which would be unimaginable in Russia (outside professional Antisemitic circles) where nobody reads the Bible and Christianity is a vague, ethnically coded token of being based and patriotic, more like Chinese ancestor worship. There aren't even any "cultural Christian values" like charity. The State's preference to persist in this Orthodox advocacy is not indicative of the popular demand for irrationalism; quite the opposite, it's another grift vector and a top-down attempt at social engineering like the insane WWII sacralization (Immortal Regiment) that the people passively accept (which is actually a massive mark against Russian culture, just a different one).
Russia is an irredeemably jaded, atheistic country with performative orthotrad LARP (which liberals despise and so discuss a lot) at the top; the United States is a nominally secular polytheocracy and wholly indifferent to the ostensible Western tradition of rational thought or whatever. Weirder things had happened in history.
Your assorted defenses are even less interesting. The archetypal "Russian great" who can stand on the international stage, among Westerners you've listed, is not some cute Tyutchev. That's Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, Mendeleev and Lobachevsky, Suvorov and Zhukov, Serov, Vasnetsov and Vrubel, Pavlov and Vavilov, Pontryagin and Kolmogorov, Tsiolkovsky and Sikorsky, Korolev and Sakharov, Cherenkov and Glushko, and so on and so forth (seeing your snide remarks on Pushkin, motivated by his fairly minor African ancestry, I exclude clearly ethnically alien individuals like Levitan and Aivazovsky; but as they are recognized to be "spiritually Russian", they demonstrate the assimilative capacity of the Russian egregore, if anything). Those are obviously normal European elite human capital, whether from noble and admixed families or from the depths of Eastern European serf/Cossack/military/clergy genetic pool, with more or less intense educational and professional engagement with the West proper. There is no comparison to be made to the Japanese or Bolivians or Arabs, whether in achievement or, more to the point, in the degree of relatedness to the European cultural tradition; and your framing is simply a rationalization of the personal sense of distance from Ruskies and Soviets. This isn't so much Usenet or, rather, FidoNet as Tiphareth discourse straight from 2003 AD. It's all so tiresome.
You may notice I can answer questions on my presumed prejudices directly and resolutely, while you can not.
I do not recognize your "answers" as honest, because your entire line of argumentation – in essence, going back to the top, that «Russians are just Europeans from 200 years ago» thesis understates their moral and philosophical distance from the West, and why they're therefore more deserving to be considered vermin by modern Europeans – is deeply biased, whether you can recognize this or not. I've had enough of this sophistry with the likes of Verbitsky, long ago, so here my explanations end.
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.
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