jkf
9hr ago
The issue is that there wouldn't be any need for an all out war, at least with India.
China doesn't see it this way, so none of what else you say matters -- if there's a possibility that a war might occur, they want to be in the best possible position for it.
Like I said it's a bit of a throwback to pre-WWI international relations, but you see it a bit in Russia's adventures in Ukraine. Happens when high-ranking military officials get a direct voice in diplomacy.
jkf
10hr ago
the past few administrations have increasingly become China hawks
LOL
https://www.nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf
jkf
10hr ago
I realize how much of the international opprobrium China faces is entirely due to its own weight throwing, for very little potential gain in this particular case.
Chinese foreign policy is a bit of a throwback in that it's strongly driven by concrete strategic military goals, AIUI -- if they care about the random mountains, it's because they think that they are useful in an all-out war. Same with Tibet, same with Taiwan.
jkf
11hr ago
Trump himself could probably be sold on the idea of a unified trade bloc going after China -- this would probably an actual Good Thing, but Canadian politics is pretty compromised on that front so we will probably only hear that Going After China is Racist or something.
jkf
11hr ago
Canada's certainly been having a go at taxing digital media services lately -- and has had regulations effectively subsidizing locally produced movies/shows for a long time.
The recent scrap with Facebook/Google is I think theoretically nation-agnostic in that Canadian social media giants would also have to pay -- but given that there aren't any Canadian social media giants it could see viewing it as a kind of tariff.
jkf
2d ago
"Trudeau is retarded" is not a controversial position -- even people who like him are not doing it on the basis that he's smart.
Trudeau just is a lib why would he agree with Trump politically?
Policy is not the issue, it's his history of moralizing with Trump on unrelated issues; 'too woke' essentially -- and now Trump is cancelling him along with all the other woke stuff.
Like, I think the case that this is just fundamentally predatory - targeting a nation that is both inherently dependent on the US and has actively made itself moreso due to bad policy - is actually a much more sensible one.
If that's what Trump is thinking then he's retarded too -- while the actual gross balance going south is not that large compared to other partners, it's primarily inputs to a wide cross-section of American industry. My guess is that the Trump tariffs on Canadian imports will be more harmful to US businesses than the lame-ass 'retaliatory' ones Trudeau is proposing.
Self-owns all round I guess -- but somebody who is willing to build a personal relationship with Trump is what's needed to mend it. "Shamrock Summit II" anyone?
jkf
2d ago
And then Trump shows back up treating Trudeau as a domestic partisan enemy because ??
Because he is?
Trudeau (like Zelensky, maybe) made the mistake of aligning himself with the (current) losing side on US politics, strongly and explicitly. There's no way he's walking back from that; he also hates Trump, and Trump knows it.
Everything is personal with Trump; kind of a weird way to run a country, but easy enough to work with if you aren't an idiot.
jkf
2d ago
A sound is not a word? (or chunk thereof)
There also is not a 1:1 mapping of sounds to tokens in English. (or most languages really, but English is particularly bad that way)
LLMs are trained on text corpora -- how do you map those text tokens to sound data?
jkf
2d ago
Nah, it's inorganic, and probably astroturfed to a large degree. People will settle down soon enough.
jkf
2d ago
Probably the majority of the 'realpolitik' posts are bent on avoiding the stating of plain facts such as that 'Russia is a totalitarian state that invaded a democracy'.
I have no problem with this, but would tend not to include it in a realpolitik post because it's exactly the kind of thing that's irrelevant in a realpolitik framework.
jkf
2d ago
All that remains to be seen is if the Red party calls an election immediately, or tries to force the Blue party to vote for a non-confidence vote
They've got their sugar rush, I think they will go for it -- I do think there's some Kamala effect going on here at the moment and they will still lose, but I guess wrecking the country to avert a landslide is what these fuckers would consider a win.
jkf
2d ago
It could (maybe), but this is drifting even further from how current LLMs work -- the previous discussion on this was around an example where (if the model were doing this rather than working from a transcript and hallucinating) it completely failed to account for pronunciation, much less tone.
jkf
2d ago
But audio tokens are not intercompatible with text tokens, for obvious reasons -- if you were to train your model on a corpus of audio tokens intermingled with the text ones, wouldn't it tend to respond differently depending on the form of your input?
jkf
2d ago
If we can manage to elect somebody who's not a total moron (so yeah, probably boned) I think it can be OK -- the current sabre rattling (pocket-knife rattling?) is exclusively to play to domestic morons for a sugar rush in the polls. The political is very very personal for Trump, and since he & Trudeau already hate each other deeply there was never going to be any rapprochement until he's gone -- the upside is that there is an opportunity there for the new guy to, um, build back better?
I do hope that during the campaign somebody will be able to convincingly point out that adding to the burden of American tariffs on our producers' exports with an additional domestic tariff burden on a big chunk of their input costs is the most retarded idea I've ever heard -- are we really that dumb?
jkf
3d ago
I don't think it's not within their potential capabilities, I just don't see any reason why this would be added -- if you were to do so, it clearly would need to be specifically trained on audio tokens which seems to me to amount to embedding a Whisper model into your LLM. I just don't see any reason to do that? Wouldn't it make more sense to just call a transcription model (which as you know are pretty good these days) and throw the resulting text at your LLM?
jkf
3d ago
My point earlier was that the realpolitik perspective is indistinguishable from the Russian propaganada, for me anyways. Continuing to fight a war you can't win is just not a good idea, even though invading your neighbours is not a nice thing to do.
So Russian propaganda says "Russia Stronk -- Ukraine can't win and should give up before we crush them" -- how do you tell the difference between this and a complicated analysis of military strength arriving at the same conclusion? (which is basically my position on this, despite not being a Russian propagandist -- I do read with interest (for example) Dean's complicated analyses showing that Ukraine might win in the end; I just don't think they are correct)
jkf
3d ago
So you don't like hearing people talk about the Ukraine war at all? Nobody is forcing you to read it of course, but it's been a pretty major topic of discussion on here for a number of years.
jkf
3d ago
An army green t-shirt and an cheap bomber-style jacket, yes -- that's kind of the point being made here.
jkf
3d ago
Looks more like the guy who shops at the PX of the local army base and then hangs around nearby bars to me:
"I'm not saying I'm a soldier, buuuuut...."
jkf
3d ago
So now that you know what realpolitik is, how confident are you in your ability to distinguish it from Russian propaganda?
jkf
4d ago
The only IT practices you need there are regular backups though -- "fuck off" is the best response to ransomware people -- a week's financials are not much leverage for them.
jkf
6d ago
I'm thinking of stuff like this:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5692
Granted it doesn't say "send Ukraine X tanks and Y artillery shells", but doesn't Trump get into impoundment issues if he just sits on the allocation?
The 1938 parallel just does not work. Germany at the time was weakened but growing stronger every day. That's the exact opposite of today – where Russia is strong (due to nukes, leftover Cold War firepower) but growing weaker every day.
Interesting that the warmongers always want to look at 1938 and not 1914 when talking about appeasement -- it's pretty easy to make the argument that absolutely everyone would have been better off if Serbia were just given over to Austria.
It would even solve the question of whether to appease Hitler in 1938, since all he'd be after is a few pfennigs for his latest artwork.
jkf
6d ago
Interesting about Macron -- Zelensky, I think he just doesn't get the joke TBH. Too much getting high on... if not his own supply, that of the social media egregore which turns out not to have much actual power.
That said I didn't really seem much in the deal for him, so he hasn't really lost anything. Does Trump even have the power to unilaterally cut off aid? I thought that was mostly a Congress thing.
It's more effort than he deserves -- "LPC is hawkish on China" isn't even low effort, it's just agitprop.
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