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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37320 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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This is my first contribution to this forum. Please let me know if anything concerning the style and content of my post clashes with the etiquette here. This text became far longer than I had initially planned, and I simplified a lot for the sake of brevity, so tell me if this is unreadable or if any shortcut I made was inappropriate, misleading or reductive.

The historiography of Nazi Germany – and, by extension, the way we historically situate and contextualise Fascism and the Holocaust – appears to me at first glance as an extremely rare example of historical actors impressing a specific, directed and lasting reading unto an event successfully. By this I refer to the conscious decision of the Allied powers to organize the Nuremberg Trials not only as a necessary legal consequence of Germany’s defeat, but to equally structure the proceedings as an epochal “History Lesson” for present and future generations.

As such, the trials aimed at 2 outcomes, running paralel while remaining distinct in scope and function : on the one hand, dismantling any vestiges of Nazi power by punishing the leadership for its criminality and warmongering, on the other, establishing a clear narrative of how and why the Nazi movement gained power, and how and why it abused this power for atrocious wrongdoings. The second outcome was embedded with the pivotal function of establishing a lasting definition of what is “bad” within Western society after the chaotic political turmoil of the Interwar periods – a definition that became nigh-universally accepted (at least on the rhetorical level) across the entire Western political spectrum following the trials. This is what I mean by “extremely rare example of historical actors impressing a specific, directed and lasting reading unto an event successfully”: almost all attempts to craft a historical narrative when undertaken by actors contemporaneous to the events fail to take root in the desired manner.

Think of the monumental propaganda effort launched by the combined power of all European monarchies after Napoleon’s final defeat to posit his rise and power, and the French Revolution that preceeded it, as an abominable fluke upsetting the natural order of society as it had existed for the past millennia. The wanton violence of the Revolutionary Terror and the vast slaughter of Napoleon’s wars were presented as the logical consequence of abandoning the hierarchical order of divinely ordained monarchic societies, and were presented as a cautionary tale against political upheaval. The actors of the Congress of Vienna were able to suppress counter-readings of the French Revolution and Napoleon for the 3 ensuing decades, mainly by means of a burgeoning police state and an intense propaganda push towards domesticity and social harmony that heavily shamed and discouraged political discussions both in public and private. Despite this, the Pandora’s box opened by France in 1789 (which can be resumed as “the world, and the societies in it, are something we actively make, and can thus actively make differently if we so desire”) could not be closed again and the growing demand for new sociopolitical paradigms could only be slowed, not stopped entirely. That the “History Lesson” taught at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had failed to take root became apparent by the middle of the 19th Century – liberalism, nationalism, socialism were on the road to full normalisation (with certain caveats depending on social class), and France had willingly resurrected Napoleon from the dead by electing his nephew as their leader, largely cheering him on when he quickly moved to resurrect the Empire itself. The kings present at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 believed they were consolidating their natural power after an irregular disturbance – today we see the event as the Beginning Of The End for the old order of monarchic, divinely ordained societies. Today, their “History Lesson” is absolutely obsolete : rather, the exact opposite narrative is now the dominant historical reading.

Back to Nuremberg :

Despite the trial itself not running as smoothly as planned and initially garnering a mixed, if not negative reception (the defence pointed out that many charges levied against Nazi Germany also applied to the Colonial powers present among the Allies, and Göring in particular noted the irony of being accused of illegaly seizing power and dismantling Weimar Germany by America, France, and the Soviet Union, all countries that came into being by violent upheaval against the legal order and whos entire national identity revolved around said upheaval), the ensuing Cold War and the economic miracle of post-war Europe rapidly erased these concerns and led to a progressive consolidation of the trials central takeaways : namely, that the ideological foundations of National Socialism – a term at this point used synonymously with Fascism – were irreonciliable with any meaningful definition of morality or freedom, and that the consequences of its rise to power – Totalitarianism, Oppression, War, and, most importantly, Genocide – were inevitable elements of the ideology itself. Here we arrive at the rhetorical post-war consensus that still dominates the way we view politics to this day, in which what is politically “bad” is essentially whatever seems closest to Fascism. In order to understand the total narrative victory of the Nuremberg Trials, consider that both Ukraine and Russia routinely accuse each other of being led by Nazis – somewhat strange when we consider that the Nazis considered Slavs as a subhuman race only fit for slavery, and that Ukraine’s President is literally jewish. In truth, if Zelenskyy or Putin were actual Nazis, sincerely believing in Hitler’s vision of the world, they would both either kill themselves out of self-loathing for being subhumans, or seek to become enslaved vassals of the superior Aryan nations who by virtue of biological superiority should be their natural leaders. Obviously, neither Zelenskyy nor Putin believe or want any of that, because they are not Nazis by any serious definition of the term. What they are actually doing by accusing each other is saying “History has taught us that bad politics lead to the worst crimes and barbarism, and my opponent is a bad politician, thus any means taken against him are fair game since they seek to avoid the most calamitous of all outcomes”. What’s interesting is that this reveals a shared consensus on both sides of the conflict – there is a line dividing what is acceptable politics from what is unacceptable politics, and both agree on Fascism defining the latter.

We can see the same dynamic in pretty much every political polarisation in the West – woke activism is Fascist, covid-induced lockdowns are Fascist, deporting illegal immigrants is Fascist, hate speech laws are Fascist, free speech absolutism is Fascist, etc. Funny to think that in times of such extreme polarisation we actually rhetorically agree more than ever on what is politically bad!

The problem with this development, of course, is that we have completely diluted the meaning of the term and with it any real understanding of what Nazi Germany actually was and what “Fascism” actually means. Starting with the most glaring issue : the Nazis never once called themselves Fascist, nor did they see National Socialism as a Fascist project. As far as Fascism can be defined in a sincere and historically rigorous manner, it was a specific post-WWI project led by Italian ex-Socialists and Bourgeois reactionaries to unite an economically and culturally disparate country roiled by poverty, sectionalism, and class conflict (remember that Italy as a country had barely existed for 60 years at the end of World War I and was composed of subgroups that often had next to nothing in common aside from a shared Roman Catholic faith – not even speaking the same language or belonging to the same ethnicity) by establishing a narrative of “national rebirth” in which individual markers of identity were to be sublimated into a collective force that, by nature of its united will acting as one cohesive unit, would lead to a prosperous and ordered society unmarred by ingroup/outgroup conflict. The symbol and namesake of Fascism, the ancient Roman “Fasces”, is a group of sticks bundled into one : individually, any twig can be snapped, but bound together as one, they are unbreakable. This symbol itself is of course also the official coat of arms of France today and is carved into the Halls of Congress in Washington.

Now, let me be clear that I’m not attempting an Apology of Italian Fascism, nor are my personal political opinions relevant to what I’m trying to get at. What I do want to state clearly is that in the one, single, actual example of a self-declared Fascist state in History (I’m not counting Franco’s clerical authoritarianism, nor Hirohito’s ultra-monarchism, nor Dollfuß’ half-baked pseudo-medievalist corporatism, nor any ultranationalist ethnic movement in the Balkans, nor Hitler’s ethnic Darwinism as examples of Fascism, since their political models developed largely independantly of Mussolini’s and only share certain principles that can also arguably be found in the Stalinist Soviet Union, Revolutionary France, or the British Empire), we have very few elements of what the average consensus definition of Fascism holds – as a matter of fact, most of the “consensus-fascist” policies of Fascist Italy were reluctantly adopted by Mussolini in order to strengthen his tactical alliance with Hitler after having been alienated and ostracised from other Western powers following his colonialist conquests (Italy was late to the party; had it invaded Ethiopia half a century earlier, no European power would have cared much as they were all doing the same) – by all intents and purposes, Mussolini saw antisemitism and racial supremacy as a German oddity completely foreign to Italian (and by extension ancient Roman) history, allowed Fascist Jews to occupy high political positions, and suggested “Italianisation” of conquered territories’ population by cultural and ideological means. Suffice to say, racial classification, extermination camps, antisemitic progroms and ethnic genocides are completely absent from Mussolini’s vision of Fascism and from Fascist Italy before the country backed itself into a geopolitical corner and reluctanctly agreed to emulate certain policies in order to appease Hitler, most likely expecting this to be a passing necessity until the Allied powers would sue for peace. By 1942, however, the tables were starting to turn on the Axis powers, and Mussolini was removed from office a year later so that the remaining Fascist leaders could broker a peace agreement with the Allies, not realizing that it was far too late for the Fascist State to survive after any eventual capitulation.

Enough with Italy. Back to the topic at hand : the “History Lesson” of Nuremberg and its continued narrative domination of Western discourse. I have noticed something interesting in the past decade of rising discontent with the way our Western societies are organised and run culturally, politically and economically: after roughly 80 years of brute-forcing Fascism and Nazis as “the one thing we all agree to be the opposite of” by institutions, parties and cultural tastemakers, these words have acquired an almost cosmic power – Nazism/Fascism is no longer the precise result of a certain historical context and situation (disenchantment with modernity, the trauma of WW1, the humiliation and economic misery wrought upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles and the stock market collapse of 1929, enlightened scientific theories of racial classification, rapid technological advance, a poorly and hastily written Weimar constitution that most Germans never identified with from the get-go, etc.), but a sort of Original Sin or ambiant Samsara, a dormant evil that can awaken at any moment and cause the exact same barbarity as it did almost a century ago. This quasi-metaphysical perspective is of course mystification to the highest degree and precludes any real understanding of how historical trends take shape. Equally frustrating is the recurrent use of quotes by German intellectuals and politicians of the Weimar era saying “if only we had done X or Y, none of this would have happened”, as if Weimar Germany would have suddendly turned into a functioning society if only someone had killed Hitler as a baby or kept him locked up after the Beer Hall Putsch. Both this perspective and the vision of Fascism as Samsara engage in the same mystifcation. In truth, Weimar Germany was never functional, nor was it accepted by a critical mass of German society, and one can easily imagine alternative scenarios in which the country falls to a Monarchist coup, Communist insurrection, or some non-Nazi variant of Völkisch German supremacist ideology.

As such, we have become societies that neurotically conceive of Fascism as a kind of Sword of Damocles or Ragnarok-level event, ready to return at any moment, if not even destined to return by some kind of teleology of democratic crisis. And here is the craziest aspect of all of this : this actually might be true, albeit not at all for the reasons one might think. By defining itself as “everything except Fascist”, ruling institutions, parties and ideologies have actually strengthened the cosmic power of Fascism considerably – if crisis after crisis remains unsolved, if civil society no longer feels heard by its elites, if there is widespread distrust and contempt for institutions, if the standards of living and public safety keep declining, all while everyone in a position of power and influence keeps reminding you they are the opposite of Fascism – well, that makes Fascism pretty attractive, doesn’t it? In a way, it almost makes it the only alternative, since everyone in power – no matter if Social Democrat, classical liberal, conservative nationalist or libertarian tech CEO - and thus ostensibly responsible for the pauperisation, uncertainity and cynicism resounding across Western society today, will all be quick to remind you that the one thing they are not is Fascist. In France’s parliamentary elections this past summer, far-left Insoumis and neoliberal Macronists entered into tactical alliances in some areas in order to block a far-right victory in their First-Past-The-Post voting system – after years of calling each other the worst insults and claiming the other was responsible for much of France’s severe problems, be it rising poverty, crime, mass immigration, etc. Apparently, all these presumed existential differences became irrelevant the moment a presumed Fascist (I don’t think the RN is Fascist, but mainstream French institutions largely do) was the alternative. If I were a struggling Frenchman experiencing progressive impoverishment and fear, I would probably take such alliances as proof that there are only 2 meaningful political options – the Status Quo, and the Fascists.

In conclusion : perhaps the “History Lesson” of the Nuremberg Trials is closer to that of the Congress of Vienna than it seems at first glance – perhaps, by spending 3 decades saying “we are the opposite of Napoleon and of Republicanism”, the Monarchies of Europe made these spectres of the past far more powerful than they would have been otherwise. Perhaps they underestimated how much resenmtent had festered against them, much the same way resentment against our elite is festering within our societies today, making whatever is the opposite of them far more attractive than it would be in a vacuum. Already, we see figures like Musk toying with the Nazi salute – not because Musk believes in Aryan Lebensraum, but because Nazism has become counterculture, an expression of rebellion against the system and its increasingly hard to believe, self-serving and contradictory claims of morality and virtue. If Fascism returns, it won’t be like the original Fascism because it can’t be – we will never be in 1918 again, we don’t have a meaningful shared understanding of what Fascism even is, and our historical situation is our own. But it might well harness the rhetorical power we have given Fascism as the only believable way of saying “we are the opposite of them. They say so themselves. And you hate them.”

The US doesn't determine who her friends or enemies are, according to race. The US backed China in the Second Sino-Chinese War with Japan, that the ruler of mainland China didn't enjoy US favour until Nixon, has to do with political considerations. It isn't hypocritical to consider a country your friend when it is fighting your enemy, as was the case with China after Pearl Harbor, and your enemy once it is waging a war against you, as was the case with China during the Korean War.

A common pro-Russian talking point is that Russia is encircled by US military bases in non-US countries, and that Russia considers such bases a threat. A legitimate position, which I won't categorically dispute.

But now some argue US should treat Russia, like it does Japan. But why does the US treat Japan like an ally? Utter submission, can't even make cars too good, without the US stepping in with tarrifs. Also hosting a shitload of US military personnel, which enjoy something approaching the extraterritoriality privilege, in that any crime they are expected to receive a more [lenient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girard_incident} punishment than if they were a Japanese citizen.

Russia is free to offer an unconditional surrender to the US, accept its leaders being tried by Americans and Ukranians, losing the capability to wage offensive war (in Russia's case the nukes would also probably have to go), allowing the establishment of US military bases on its territoty, etc. This would be a significant infringement of Russian sovereignity, in my opinion greater than Ukraine joining NATO, the possibility of which is used by Russia as a justification for its war against Ukraine.

So it goes quite a few of Russia's red lines, but in return US would probably be willing to consider Russia an ally as close Japan.

Your example is terrible. Girard was, according to that Wikipedia article, tried by the Japanese as they requested. I suspect that had the Japanese accepted that he was under US jurisdiction, he would have received harsher punishment.

It is a great example and I knew he was tried by a Jalanese court. That he was treated so leniently is proof of political considerations of not angering the US. Why should a crime committed in Japan fall under US jurisdiction, unless extraterritoriality is in play?

Edit: That Girard would be more sternly pinished by the US, is also merely your supposition. Other soldiers who killed Japanese civilians in peacetime after WW2, if tried by the US courts, faced no criminal punishment, merely nominal fines and expectations of resignation.

Other people orbiting the Trump administration have voiced similar opinions re China, basically that it doesn't serve US interests to continue fighting with them.

And these people are notably orbiting the Trump administration rather than being a part of it's leadership structure because the Trump's key military and diplomatic appointments are China hawks who see Ukraine as a distraction for focusing on China containment. They are 'pro-Russia' in the sense as they see Russia as wrongly prioritized and better left delegated to the Europeans, not that they see Russia as a potential ally against China, and they certainly aren't against China containment in principle.

If you're just raising that someone is making a message, sure, ok- always has been. 'Sees the US as adopting a hypocritical forein policy since the start of the Cold War and glossing over its own bad actions' is practically a cliche, and has been on the left and the right if you knew where to look.

But anybody who believes that Musk has more foreign policy prediction value on the future of NATO than Pete Hegsworth, Trump's chosen Secretary of Defense, are probably going to be as confused as people who lament that Mearsheimer wasn't heeded in the 90's, without understanding why Mearsheimer wasn't heeded in the 90's. If someone wants to argue that personnel are policy, it generally helps to recognize the personnel who are actually setting policy.

Compare how the Chinese have played things compared to the neo-cons.

During the cold war Sino-Russian relations were tense and the countries had sizeable portions of the militaries on each other's borders. Russia pancaked itself during the 90s and instead of abusing Russia the Chinese were rather generous. Russia had treated China poorly and the Chinese responded by being respectful. Today China has almost no troops along the Russian border and they can buy the natural resources between Turkey and Alaska, or Norway and North Korea at a discount.

Meanwhile the west has embargoed it self from one of the largest resource producers in the world and has to sustain a military 25% of the size of the US military fighting a high intensity war against Russia while having to maintain a separate military force capable of defeating Russia on Russia's northern flank. Russia has become an endless black hole for western military resources that is going to cost mountains of equipment and manpower for decades. China isn't paying this incompentence tax.

The US spent two trillion playing 8D chess defending its strategic resources in Iraq. The Chinese bought oil fututures and let the Iraqis buy infrastructure from China with the money. Today the Chinese have stronger ties to Iraq than the US has with a percent of the budget. The US is spending far more in the middle east than China, with dubious results. The US strategy of dominating the world through military means simply doesn't work. The best strategy for the US is to do what China does.

Marty Made is largely a clown (actually thinks chief villain of WW2 was Churchill), although I haven't bothered to do that much of a deep research to understand if it's from some earnest place or he just does it for the sake of grift.

There isn't anything overly hypocritical in US conduct post-WW2, unless you subscribe to some fantasy world where everyone can and is willing to fully commit to idealism. Imperial Japanese era political foundations were dismantled to form a liberal democratic order and country was demilitarized. Yes, you can argue that there was too much of a rehabilitation of certain figures and families who were involved with Imperial Japan, but that was a pragmatic choice to contain the Soviet & China axis. Even if one casts suspicion on the moral intentions of establishing liberal democracy in Japan, feeding Japan fully into the rule-based liberal democratic capitalist market order was beneficial to US. At the time it made perfect sense thus to ally Japan.

Also, dude seems to be critical about invading countries and overthrowing governments when it comes to making a shining example of a country that does not do it (China), but then seems to be awfully warm about Russia. I at least respect left-wingers of the Chomskian vein for trying to build carefully crafted cogent arguments against US-led NATO world order, but god damn these silly right-wing amateurs who peddle in dumbed down versions of it.

the US should look to ally with Russia

Can one ally with Russia, in any sense that requires future commitments rather than presently verifiable terms? What has changed in between the Berlin Blockade and now that makes them less likely to use such an alliance when it might benefit them but then ignore it as soon as it might cost them? (Fun aside: though it sounds like one of Aesop's, The Scorpion and the Frog is a Russian fable)

in order to build an economic and diplomatic relationship with China:

China is already our third-largest trading partner (right after the two that each share thousands of miles of border with us), and though our diplomatic relationship is somewhat strained by philosophical tensions similar to our tensions with Russia, e.g. between "conquest is bad" versus "if the other guys are basically the same ethnicity then it shouldn't even really count as an invasion when we send in the military", I don't think the proper resolution here is to just switch teams. There are a lot of potential Sudetenland "special military operation" opportunities in the world, and it's a better place when they're unrealized opportunities.

and we allied w/Japan

Despite my suspicions above, I would agree that if Russia agrees to an unconditional surrender, demilitarization and disarmament, an American rewrite of their constitution, and acceptance of military occupation to enforce it all, that would be ample evidence of sufficient change for us to ally with them afterwards.

More to the point, why would Russia ally with a country that has indicated willingness to do 180-degree turns in foreign policy and abandon previous allies at will due to local power shifts?

Very fair point.

I suspect the answer intended by the US Constitution was also the one you'd get from game theory: treaties are supreme over other laws, and require a 2/3 Senate vote to ratify, and naturally you're not going to swing wildly from "2/3 in favor of ratification" to "2/3 in favor of nullification", so once a treaty is ratified it should be relatively trustworthy.

Unfortunately the Constitution doesn't actually spell out the "2/3 in favor of nullification" part of that, and so the status quo for terminating a treaty ended up somewhere in between "big legalese mess" and "the President can do whatever he wants", leaning towards the latter. I would still trust the US with an alliance more than Russia, but not as much more as I'd like to.

Thank God for that oversight. If we needed 2/3rds of the Senate to get out of a treaty we would not be a sovereign nation but a mere puppet of the many countries we have signed unwise treaties with in moments of weakness.

In a better world, treaties should automatically sunset and be renewed after some period of time. Perhaps 10 years.

Can one ally with Russia, in any sense that requires future commitments rather than presently verifiable terms?

I'd say probably not. No alliance is truly reliable, but alliances with Russia seem far more dicey than most. But probably not as dicey as a "lasting understanding" with China! This is just a bad idea all around.

I think this is a fantastic idea...or was, fifteen years ago. Now? To counterbalance China? Over Taiwan?

Here's the truth. Putin went to Xi when things started getting dicy in Ukraine. Western backed aid has killed tens of thousands of Russians. If Xi launches his thousand ships against Taiwan, my guess is that Putin's aid is already locked in.

It might be possible that Putin (who I do think is a pro-Westerner by inclination) thinks he can get more of what he wants by being "reasonable" and ONCE AGAIN playing "reset" with the United States. And perhaps he has a preexisting understanding of sorts with Trump that he wants to honor. But I do not think the United States should make any compromises in the belief that it can neutralize Russia in the 2020s against China. Longer-term thinking, sure, that's fine, particularly with a consistent objective. But if China goes to war with Taiwan tomorrow, Russia probably has their back.

It's Martyr Made, not Marty.

US beef with China seems to mainly China's potential to make US no longer be the unipolar superpower by China growing richer and stronger, the other issues are pretexts. In that case no coming to an understanding is possible, either US contains China's rise while it still can or not.

China also has looming demographic issues that are far worse than America's: I don't think it has a sustainable path to long-term superpower status because the legacy of the one-child policy will have the median age in China rapidly pass that in the US within the next decade or so. Even if, God forbid, war breaks out, how many only sons (and only grandsons) can be sent home in boxes before the Mandate of Heaven is lost? I don't know, or want to find out, but to me it'd at least be a real concern.

I think China has at least another good decade going for it, and may well stay relevant beyond that too.

US is turning into Brazil demographically along with the population aging, that's not great either.

The U.S. is still slightly whiter than Brazil, but the core white population appears to have much more stable fertility rates than any secular white population elsewhere in the world, and Brazil’s human capital isn’t that low anyways, it’s suffering from Latin America syndrome. There’s more than enough doctors and engineers to maintain a functional civilization there, it isn’t Africa.

Brazil has the human capital to be much richer than it is, you can imagine a Brazil where the largest cities and the whole of the south are essentially first world (Brazilians will tell you places like Florianopolis are like this; they aren’t) and only the north is kind of poor and violent.

I can imagine a Brazil which is a first world country over the entire place, albeit with welfare transfers to the north and a high crime rate. Brazil easily has the human capital for (south)Western European standards. Corruption, socialism, and neighborhood are the things holding it back.

That is not our beef with China. China runs a market closed to American business - it forces the transfer of ownership and IP, while our market is relatively open. China systematically spies on American businesses and academia to steal IP for the purpose of competition (not national security). China was the main supplier of synthetic opioids to the US.

No agreement can make china stop copying american ip because weak IP protections is just the objectively correct economic prescription. All IP laws except trademarks should be destroyed for being bullshit rent seeking.

So US wants to fight China in South China sea and Taiwan due to IP infringement? CIA trains Uighurs how to do terrorism because of IP infringement?

Edit: and if another country was becoming a leading superpower fair and square US would just let them?

No, I don’t believe that. China making it zero sum is throwing fuel on the fire though.

The argument is strange. The US doesn’t need Russia to cut a deal with China, China very much wants to do business with the US, the US can cut deals directly; neither the Americans nor the Chinese think much of Russian honor or ever have, why would a far lesser power be needed as guarantor or even for an introduction?

But, of course, I fully agree that peace with China is necessary and just. Saber rattling there serves nobody any good. Offer the smarter Taiwanese a negotiated route to Singapore (a de facto Chinese ethnostate run to preserve a permanent Chinese majority) or to places in the US orbit or neutral-ish countries in SEA like Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines where the Chinese minority is extremely overrepresented in the elite, and then negotiate a return of the island to China. Then be done with the region beyond trade.

I’m all in favor of American imperialism but its clear focus should be on the Americas and Europe.

Why send them to Singapore? Move them directly to the US.

The founder of TSCM was educated in the US, worked in the US for decades and is a US citizen. He moved to Taiwan to start TSMC and recruited Chinese and Taiwanese Americans to join him in Taiwan. I don't see why they couldn't move back. Like the way we treat Cubans.

Sure, that is an option for some too.

Why would we need to ally with Russia to ‘build a relationship’ with China? We have a relationship with China.

And more to the point, why would Russia want to ally with us? We have no interests in common and a consistent theme of Russian foreign policy is preferring their own sovereignty over material prosperity. They’d far rather be China’s junior partner than America’s vassal.

People have commented that Zelensky's casual attire and his debating Trump and Vance in front of the media seems disrespectful or challenging to Trump. That's because it is. Contrary to Trump's claim that he has no cards, he does have a card - his popularity in Western media and the US congress. Trump has a thin margin in Congress and foreign policy is an area where a few Republicans are likely to peel off in support of popular wars.

Zelensky is betting that he is more powerful than Trump where it matters. If Trump has no power to withhold ongoing support from Zelensky, then it is Zelensky, not Trump, that controls American Ukraine policy. The press conference and its fallout serves as a test of strength where Zelensky challenges Trump and then gauges the results to see if his assumptions are correct.

That still doesn't give Zelensky a path to achieving any maximalist war objective. But it does give him a path to retaining the status quo of indefinite American material support, which seems good enough to him for the moment. Trump may be the elected President of the United States, he may be taller, better dressed, and more objectively correct about the best path forward. But in an open democracy it is popularity that matters - not any of those other things. And the contest pits Trump against America's most beloved political celebrity of the last three years.

It's no accident that Zelenksy looks like a character from a Marvel movie (strong resemblance to Hawkeye in particular). It is a persona designed to appeal to the American public. The President has a few explicit powers that a celebrity does not. But when it comes to swaying the US congress, it is an even battle ground - popularity vs. popularity, celebrity vs. celebrity. Zelensky thinks he can get 51 votes in the Senate and he's not going to sign any compromise agreement until he is reasonably sure he will lose.

Seeing how the western media desperately mischaracterized what happened and engaged in their usual distortionary editing and reporting, you are absolutely correct that he has them in his pocket. All the more reason for the average republican to distrust him, given their rock bottom trust in journalists in general. But maybe his gambit will pay off

Although he might just be a bit of an arrogant type of person - apparently Biden hung up on him because of his attitude previously.

What outlets in Western media mischaracterized what happened? What distortions did they make in particular?

Mostly that what Vance said was unprovoked. They all basically tried to craft a “he started it” narrative. All the clips they show start with Vance talking, removing the entire context of what led up to it

If Trump has no power to withhold ongoing support from Zelensky

Well he certainly seems to think he does:

Donald Trump is expected to discuss cancelling military aid to Ukraine when he meets with key advisors later today.

The president will speak with senior advisers, including Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, to consider a range of options, including cancelling aid that was approved and paid for by the Biden administration, the New York Times reported.

I confess to being ignorant of the mechanics of how all this works, and a cursory Google search didn't turn up much, so if someone with more expertise wants to chime in please do. But the news articles coming out today seem to indicate that the President and his national security team have essentially unilateral power to withhold aid from Ukraine if they choose to.

This looks like it fits in with Trump's strategy to increase executive power by refusing to spend funds that Congress has appropriated, like how he shut down USAID. This is still a legal gambit on Trump's part, and it's not clear that he will get away with it.

If he does hold back aid for even a short period of time, the media response will be withering. Zelensky is popular. Does he have enough time before the midterms to weather the storm and pressure Zelensky to come to the table?

He really needs to lie better like the Biden admin did. Just slow role it, tie it up in court, complain about the "Parliamentarian", and give the money to a Republican Patronage Network that might, after 10 years, spent 0.01% of the money on Ukraine versus their pet causes. Shit, spend all of it on that Strategic Crypto Reserve and claim it's to keep Russia from getting all the Crypto. It'll hold up about as well as all the money Biden drained from the government for illegals getting tons of free shit. Trump's problem is that he's such a worse liar than the typical politician to whom words mean nothing, and passive aggression is the primary winning strategy. Trump feels this compulsive need to beat his chest and openly fight with people, instead of just lying that he'll do something, and then doing whatever he wants anyways with 100 layers of indirection and plausible deniability.

According to this, the funding for Ukraine is drawn from multiple sources, and at least some of those sources are under the direct control of the President/DoD:

Pursuant to a delegation by the President, we have used the emergency Presidential Drawdown Authority on 55 occasions since August 2021 to provide Ukraine military assistance totaling approximately $31.7 billion from DoD stockpiles.

On September 26, 2024, the Department notified Congress of the intent to direct the drawdown of up to approximately $5.55 billion in defense articles and services from DoD stocks for military assistance to Ukraine under Presidential Drawdown Authority.

Would be a bit odd if the President couldn't simply decline to exercise the Presidential Drawdown Authority. It wouldn't be much of an Authority in that case.

So, there are some funding sources that couldn't be canceled without getting into legally murky area, but Trump could choose to cancel a significant portion of it right away.

Interesting, thank you. That does give the President some short term discretionary leverage. But looking out on a longer timeline, Congress has the power to write spending bills that the President cannot stop

Yes, but in the long term, Zelenskyy could be dead, or at least Ukraine could be in a much worse position. A battle between Congress and Trump would take time, and that time would not be on Ukraine's side.

They do. As a legal authority matter, the aid legislation is usually for sending material to Ukraine or replacing lost stock already sent, which allows the president to not-send on the basis of replacing already-sent.

As a game theory matter, a permanent cutoff right now would be a bet with a high risk of losing relevant leverage with Russia. If the US has already cutoff aid and is threatening to send no more to Ukraine, then the US cannot use either the offer of a cutoff or threat of more aid to pressure Russia. It also creates issues with leverage with Ukraine, since you can't threaten to cutoff aid if you've already cutoff aid, and while there are many who would gleefully relish Ukraine doing worse on the battlefront, that's a consequence, not an impossibility or even a categorical collapse. This is why opponents of Ukraine aid typically resort to 'they'll deserve the consequences' rather than address how a cutoff will end the war.

The key word in that, however, is 'permanent.'

As a kabuki theater/kayfabe matter, never a bad metaphor to remember with the US, a temporary cutoff allows both parties to play well for their respective political bases, before a mediated 'reconciliation' by third parties (such as the Europeans) who can facilitate a nominal compromise (such as Europeans buying weapons on behalf of Ukraine). Given how even Trump didn't appear that upset at the summit breakdown (the 'this will make for great TV' bit), and how I hardly expect Trump to refuse arms sales to Europe if offered, this could play out over weeks or even months.

My personal bet is on the former, which will play into the UKR-EU summit later this week, with any mitigation plans only revealed later this month.

Which is to say- I will be neither particularly surprised or alarmed if there's an announcement of a cutoff of military aid this week. I will be curious to see what form it takes if it does happen, particularly any concrete demands for a resumption of aid-

-because if there are easily fulfillable conditions, then that's an easy trigger for the US to flow aid back into Ukraine, which is what preserves the negotiating leverage with Russia, and lets all parties play to their preferred propaganda narratives of how they are taking advantage of it / the other parties are losing from it. And if the demand is generally unreasonable (i.e. resignation of Zelensky), then this is itself subject to a choreographed resolution via later reconciliation or managed turnover (which Zelensky has repeatedly signaled) with less stated understandings.

Which is to say, kabuki.

Which is coincidentally well timed given that Trump is due to speak to a joint session of Congress tomorrow (Tuesday) to lay out his priorities and Ukraine intentions.

Trump was impeached the first time for temporarily delaying aid to Ukraine. Or at least threatening to in a phone call. Congress shall determine what aid is sent to Ukraine.

Not every last penny is specifically earmarked and Trump has some latitude here. But his agency is quite limited.

Potential articles of impeachment outlined during the hearing include abuse of power for arranging a quid pro quo with the president of Ukraine, obstruction of Congress for hindering the House's investigation, and obstruction of justice for attempting to dismiss Robert Mueller during his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

As is frequently the case with these sorts of things, the coverup was worse than the crime. He was charged for attempting to establish a quid pro quo with Zelensky, but there's no indication that the mere act of withholding the aid itself was an impeachable offense.

I don't have much positive to say about Trump's foreign policy nominees or strategies but it's very funny to have seen every western country except the US ignoring all of their defense industries, spending, and global security, and then getting mad when the US doesn't spend those resources and materiel in the way they want.

This is media circus. As of 2024 the majority of NATO countries are meeting the 2% of GDP target, and this is broadly indicative of overall attitudes towards defence investment post Feb-22.

The fact that you needed to pick a contrived example (Why just NATO, why not other western countries? why current defense % GDP spending and not a historical average? why is 65% of them doing it but 35% of them not doing it considered a success? why aren't we just comparing total or % of GDP expenditures against the USA's numbers?) sort of proves the point I was making. If Italy produced 80% of the EU's steel, whether or not there is some norm or rule in the EU rules or treaties, I would find it pretty fucking rich if 5 other countries made it an international incident that Italy isn't using it's steel output for X or Y industry after those same countries neglected their production and investment for years.

Given current events and the context of your comment I believed you were referring to current spending levels within NATO. Seriously, who were you referring to if not a NATO member state?

I wonder if Zelensky actually believes that is casual attire is basically his version of the simple yet recognizable Mao suit.

Yes, there's probably something like that going on. What's funny about his martial-casual attire is that I very distinctively remember it being a truism when I was growing up that any head of state who routinely wore military attire was most likely a dictator or a warlord. It was even a pretty easy media trope in action and espionage movies to quickly establish that a ruler was evil by dressing the character in military uniform or some kind of martial aesthetic. There was supposed to be something unnerving and almost pathetic about a man not actively fighting on the frontline nor being an active member of the military in the conventional sense and still choosing to wear army garb each day. It's not like Thatcher wore a uniform during the Falklands War when she was in London governing, only when visiting the fighting troops.

I also remember - having gone to a French school - learning about how amidst the worsening Algeria crisis, De Gaulle responded to the erection of barricades in Algiers by appearing on state television wearing his old army uniform as a show of force and reminder of his past role in France's liberation. This move apparently shocked French society, especially on the political left, and strongly nourished already present fears that he was an authoritarian who might dismantle French Democracy.

Funny to see how quickly this association vanished with Zelenskyy, although maybe it was already an outdated 20th century relic anyway since most dictators today just wear business suits.

Funny to see how quickly this association vanished with Zelenskyy, although maybe it was already an outdated 20th century relic anyway since most dictators today just wear business suits.

Zelensky did earn it to some extent. Staying in Kyiv when it looked in imminent danger of falling to the Russians and famously telling western leaders trying to convince him to flee "I don't need a ride, I need ammo" was pretty heroic and effectively created the image in most people's minds of a leader close to literally fighting on the front lines to defend his nation. His habit of wearing military attire seemed a lot more appropriate in that context.

that any head of state who routinely wore military attire was most likely a dictator or a warlord.

Most of the examples I can think of that would have suggested this wear dress military uniforms: Franco, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and such. Although I suppose there is an association of more field-style uniforms (usually with a rifle or equivalent) with something like an African coup. I don't think Zelenskyy's attire really embodies either, but that is just my opinion. The association I remember learning also involved dictators frequently giving all their yes-men medals to wear on excessively elaborate uniforms: somewhere there is a picture from North Korea of comical numbers of medals.

Off the top of my head, Castro, Noriega, and Thomas Sankara come to mind as wearing everyday military attire, and I think Saddam usually wasn't wearing ceremonial uniforms. But yes Zelenskyy is definitely doing something more toned down and palatable.

There is a related-but-distinct line of clothing chic with Zelensky, and that is that a suit is not as benign / respectable in his context, since suites are often associated with the rich, powerful, and connected- i.e. the corrupt oligarchic class, whose reputation for selling out Ukraine is so well known that it shapes American doubter perceptions of Zelensky.

Americans like Trump want suites because it's seen as the normative / proper thing to do at high-level engagements, and being underdressed can be insulting as a sort of claim of 'I'm so important I can ignore it.' But this is not a universal view, and Zelensky breaking character not only at Trump's behest, but specifically for a very one-sided natural resource deal that could be characterized as selling out Ukraine, would be an obvious propaganda attack line.

Put another way- if the first time Zelensky put on a suit was to give the Americans a potential veto of 50% of future Ukrainian mineral projects going forward, it would not be seen by the Ukrainian home audience as a respectable and uncontroversial business affair. It would be something appropriate for a suit-wearing oligarch.

Worth also remembering that Zelensky became a Presidential candidate in the first place because he was caught on camera ranting about corrupt politicians, IIRC. His fashion choices are indeed most likely motivated by him wanting to distance himself from the politicians of yore.

Worth also remembering that Zelensky became a Presidential candidate in the first place because he was caught on camera ranting about corrupt politicians, IIRC.

Amusingly, you've confused him with the fictional character he played.

...Ah.

That was the teacher character he played in his TV show, Servant of the People

Zelensky doesn't wear a military uniform though, he just wears a sort of grey tracksuit style thing? It reads less like military and more like guy spending a lot of time in the sauna while pretending to go to the gym.

I thought he was going for military-adjacent without transparently pretending to be an actual soldier.

Maybe. He doesn't hit any marks for me and I doubt anyone would know these "intentions" and make this argument for him without him repeating it over and over to friendly press. He looks like halfway between a tech billionaire that stopped giving a fuck and an 80s mobster.

Like I said, the closest I've got is, "guy who goes to the gym all the time but never works out and just sits in the sauna."

Looks more like the guy who shops at the PX of the local army base and then hangs around nearby bars to me:

https://assets.weforum.org/sf_account/image/responsive_small_webp_2pPb1R7-GRMljQdfgjneh3e6AYb2QP2XAxAunEbA69A.webp

"I'm not saying I'm a soldier, buuuuut...."

Grey Man Chic.

It looks like a T-shirt and a cheap north face jacket to me.

An army green t-shirt and an cheap bomber-style jacket, yes -- that's kind of the point being made here.

I am by no means a fashion expert, but that is not a bomber jacket. Maybe in some esoteric fashion world it is. In the world I live in, these are bomber jackets.

Even some of those are kind of not that classy. "Cheap bomber jacket" is a total loser move.

I think it might have gone over better if he had worn his usual green fatigues. The one he wore to the White House looks too much like a track suit.

Trump just halted military aid to Ukraine.

If Zelensky was making a play to see if he has more power than Trump, then he was consuming his own propaganda. So what if he has sympathizers in congress or the general American public is in favor of aid? If Trump unilaterally halts it, what can congress or the American people do about it? The answer is... nothing. Ukraine aid is simply not a contentious issue in America, even if the average American supports Ukraine, or is in favor of aid. The most they'll do is probably go "oh well, sucks for Ukraine" and go on about their day. Sure, the blue tribe will probably use this as an opportunity for more "Trump bad!" on social media, but that's basically the SOP for everything Trump does at this point.

We'll see how long Congress lets him hold the line. I'm optimistic that there's still enough fresh bravado in the Republican coalition to hold out for long enough to allow Trump's pressure to work.

Judges are almost never impeached because the federal judiciary has an internal process where if a judge is found to have done something bad after an investigation, the judiciary will recommend that the judge voluntarily resign. The judge will almost always comply with the resignation "suggestion," because if he does not, the judiciary will recommend impeachment to congress. Such a recommendation carries a great deal of weight when your own colleagues in the judiciary think you deserve to be impeached. So the impeachment rate is low because there is an internal process that pushes judges who would otherwise get impeached to voluntarily step down.

The obvious follow up question is what percentage of judges resign in those circumstances?

Almost all of them. There are few Roy Pearsons in the federal judiciary.

I don't know whether the data exists, but my understanding is the vast majority voluntarily resign, probably over 90%.

Sorry I was unclear. I mean, what percent of federal judges are defacto "forced to resign" under the method you mentioned. 1%? 0.1%?

I don't know but probably that range is about right.

Does this internal process covers being a terrible judge, or just actions of criminal or corrupt nature?

I’m imagining a scenario where we have a judge that keeps issuing clearly wrong decisions that keep getting overturned in appeals. This stuff happens sometimes to all judges, but let’s assume we are talking someone who is wrong as a matter of law frequently very frequently and egregiously. Assume though that there is no corruption involved. Does the internal judiciary process even recognizes this as an issue? Or is Congress initiated impeachment the only option here?

The process is generally used for criminal/corrupt behavior or failing to do the job (like failing to show up to court, failing to issue opinions, failing to resign when no longer mentally competent for the job). The complete set of arcane procedures are here, I believe.

I don't know whether the process is ever invoked for judges who are "wrong as a matter of law frequently." Often this is the result of a political or philosophical disagreement rather than a failure to do one's job. For example, imagine a conservative district judge pre-Dobbs who consistently holds that Roe was wrongly decided and is not good law, and therefore keeps getting reversed. It may seem that this judge is constantly getting the law "wrong," but in fact he is getting the law "right" and will later be vindicated by Dobbs.

It may seem that this judge is constantly getting the law "wrong," but in fact he is getting the law "right" and will later be vindicated by Dobbs.

This sounds reasonable at first, but if you think about it, the legal system cannot work like that. What this means in practice for users of the system is that if they happen to have bad luck and draw this judge, it just adds an additional useless step to the process, where the superior court will have to overturn. Imagine if appeals court remands the case back to lower court. What will this lower court judge do? Will he rule wrongly again, requiring another appeal? Or will he rule as instructed by superior court in this particular case, but will do the opposite in other cases?

Anyway, my point is that the hierarchical judicial system requires lower courts to defer to rulings and opinions of superior courts. It is normal and reasonable when superior court overrules a lower court because of some mistake or error, but the system cannot maintain the trust and respect of the users where lower courts routinely ignore law and superior precedent.

Regardless, I am not aware of a real-world situation where a federal judge has been consistently "wrong" while otherwise doing his job (i.e. showing up for hearings and issuing orders in a timely fashion). For example, a federal district judge ignoring a direct order from the circuit court would be shocking. Perhaps some examples of this exist, but I am not aware of any, and presumably it would be grounds for disciplinary proceedings.

calling for the impeachment of judges you disagree with is indeed an anomaly and would likely just come back to bite you in four years.

Nobody’s going to have the votes to go impeaching judges Willy-nilly any time soon.

I think the reason they are impeaching judges is to have a chilling effect.

Since removal requires 2/3rds of the Senate, it's impossible to remove judges for partisan behavior.

But most people don't like being the subject of intense scrutiny. An impeachment trial would be humiliating to a judge, who is normally accustomed to unchallenged power and even sycophancy.

Ok- so the GOP can probably find an example, somewhere, of a democrat federal judge taking bribes(after all, there’s hundred of them). Democrats still won’t impeach because they believe the GOP is ignoring Clarence Thomas doing the same thing. That this belief is false doesn’t matter.

This analysis reminds me of how humanities and “soft” sciences often try to use mathematics to dress up arguments that are really nothing more than vibes. Why should judicial impeachments be poisson distributed? Even if they are, how do you infer the correct parameter? Using the small number of known occurrences is going to yield huge variance. I mean just look at the interesting choice of y-axis in the first chart. The numbers of impeachments are so small that you really have to strain yourself to make a coherent argument with any amount of rigor.

I don’t think trying to impeach judges is a good idea either although I also think this is a fairly obvious political response to the dems and the others in the senate who constantly tried to push Supreme Court reform which was basically just designed to give congress the ability to oversee recusal decisions: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/926/text

The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred.

Then in 2008 the federal judges "reformed" themselves, which seems to have made things even worse. I have to look into this more, obviously a complicated issue.

Is it working?

Let's say that the appointment rate of bad judges stays constant over the centuries, but the enforcement mechanisms change. We could see:

  1. a bad judge makes a number of bad decisions (possibly just one) and retires without sanction after a full career. Zero impeachments but many bad decisions.
  2. a bad judge makes a number of bad decisions and is impeached. One impeachment.
  3. a bad judge makes a number of bad decisions and is referred to the committee and accepts their recommendation to resign. Zero impeachments.
  4. a bad judge gives off some warning signs without any substantive bad decisions and is referred to the committee and either accepts their recommendation to resign or reforms and becomes good. Zero impeachments and zero bad decisions.

All I can say after reading this is that we aren't in scenario #2. The tweet author is suggesting #1, but both #3 and #4 fit with the evidence presented.

Unfortunately, which scenario between 1/3/4 you're in then hinges entirely on if a decision is bad, which often splits across partisan lines...

Using the Poisson distribution, I think it's somewhere around 3-7% depending on how you do it. So it's very fishy.

Is this a deliberate pun?

Since the complaints about Trump are growing ever more shrill in Western Europe as well and there’s an increasing level of liberal doomposting about him online, I think it bears asking the question how exactly average Blue Tribe normies believe Trump’s political ascendancy could have been averted, assuming it wasn’t some inevitable turn of events. I guess most of them agree that Hillary should’ve won in 2016 but was undermined by manufactured scandals and whatnot, but I’d put forth the argument that the US culture war was already getting so heated by that point that liberals weren’t going to secure long-term political gains through such a victory. After all, Congress was still going to be majority(?) Republican, and it was always going to be possible for Trump to win the candidacy in 2020.

If we observe what dissident right-wingers describe as the Gramscian long march through the institutions, it’s fair to conclude that the way for liberalism to win is through incremental but irreversible gains, completed while real and potential enemies remain complacent and clueless, distracted all the time by issues that are ultimately irrelevant. Thus the interest of liberals normally isn’t to escalate the culture war, no matter how good it makes them feel about themselves, but to deescalate it, and win small victories without generating too much public hostility and alienation. There’s a time for humiliating your enemies if that’s what you want, but only when they’re fatally weakened and on the ground.

Concluding from this I’d argue that the time to avert the current mess which horrifies the average liberal was in 2012, either through a) not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney, which I guess would have entirely been possible had Obama’s reelection chances not seemed slim, and which wouldn’t have ended up paving the way for someone like Trump b) Romney or someone similar winning the election through not actually being a timid cuck but not being as polarizing as Trump, and ending up governing for one term.

What do you think?

I sometimes wonder if the media had been a lot nicer to Jeb Bush, if Donald Trump would never have gained the attention and momentum to win the primary. But Trump caught on with so many voters unhappy with the system and the media. But I don't think other Republican primary candidate wins the 2016 election, tough to forsee some other candidate with populist tendencies appearing 2020, 2024, but seeing Trump's success I wonder what would have filled the vacuum.

But I don't think other Republican primary candidate wins the 2016 election

Trump had high unfavorables and was hammered by the media. I think it's reasonable that a normal Republican (Ted or Jed) could have won after 8 years of Obama, though ultimately with a different voter coalition

I think an alternative candidate still gets hammered by negative press, the media paints Obama as a huge positive, and the GOP candidate still plays by pre-Trump rules and cannot overcome those effects.

But "overcoming those effects" is also how Trump won the primary. So youre imagining a world where the press was nice to primary Jeb, but hard on general Jeb. Possible in theory, but is is really more likey than nice in both?

Until Trump arrived on the scene, my plan in 2016 was either to vote for Hillary or to stay home. In no circumstance would I ever have voted for a Bush, nor any Republican running on the Bush consensus.

not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney

I think this is a little silly. Without wishing to start the endless and pointless 'who started it' conversations, the idea that the Romney 'smear' campaign was some turning point in the breakdown of partisan relations is I think not very likely. After all Republicans ran their own set of vituperative ads in the 2012, including 'small business owners' getting faux-outraged at the stupid 'you didn't build that' (mis-)quotation and that work/welfare ad making a bare-faced lie about welfare reform. At least Bain actually did close that factory in that Obama ad.

I don't think there was ever a realistic off-ramp from where America is now, but it isn't that bad, all things considered. At least Senators don't beat each other near to death these days. Trump is pretty unique and when he sees out his term of dies I think the populist right probably loses its momentum and things start to cool down again, especially when it becomes apparent that all he will have achieved is some tax cuts which outweigh by a factor of a zillion any savings from cutting 'bureaucracy'.

Without getting into the weeds here, I think you've slightly misjudged the call of the question. The issue isn't "who started the mudslinging," or even "was the anti-Romney campaign particularly egregious" - instead what is being asked here is "what were the inflection points which activated the Trumpian base sufficiently for him to arise in 2016?" The anti-Romney campaign is one possible answer, regardless of whether the Dem's rhetoric was in part accurate, or if the heat wasn't a substantial change from what came before.

Personally I think the Romney campaign was a lost opportunity, not a Trumpian precursor. Proto-Trumpian folks did not get all that excited about Romney; they were the ones boosting Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain and Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum in the primaries. A Romney win, if followed by competent government (a huge if in the modern-day) was probably the last serious chance the GOP's "respectability" faction had to wrest the party's momentum away from the insurgent TEA-party/populist wing which ultimately coalesced under Trump.

Yeah, none of the trump supporters I know IRL is peeved about the media’s treatment of Romney- but they remember fast and furious, the IRS targeting scandal, Obama’s guns and religion comment, masterpiece cake shop, often the little sisters of the poor, and the Obama executive actions on immigration.

Don't forget operation choke point.

I guess they weren't peeved about it because the very idea that the GOP should run a respectable, sensitive, decent etc. candidate was already such a laughingstock by that point as a consequence of the Romney campaign that it didn't even occur on anyone's radar.

A Romney win, if followed by competent government (a huge if in the modern-day) was probably the last serious chance the GOP's "respectability" faction had to wrest the party's momentum away from the insurgent TEA-party/populist wing which ultimately coalesced under Trump.

While I agree that Romney's loss did not polarize anyone, in hindsight I do believe it had a surprising effect of ruining one of the left's most effective memetic attacks.

The DNC ran ran a lot of smear campaigns on Romney in an attempt to alienate the GOP base and activate their own.

Unfortunately, large swaths of the GOP voter base already viewed Romney as a worthless, squishy RINO who's main value was that he probably wouldn't ruin things as fast as Obama would.

On the DNC side, the voters completely believed it, and my hardcore left wing acquaintances genuinely meant it when they called him a "dog murdering polygamy cultist".

This caused two things to happen. The first is that this is probably the start of the DNC voter's hysteria floor moving from 1/10 to 6/10, and that made it considerably harder for leadership to unwind the outrage when it was no longer politically useful. This reached a peak in the fiery but mostly peaceful protests of 2020, but remains a problem even half a decade later.

On the GOP side, it was different. The fact that the current candidate is always some variant of a dog murdering polygamy cultist, while the previous candidate is always a guy who you may not agree with, but you can respect his principles, suddenly become a Noticeable Narrative to the GOP rank and file. Once they Noticed, imthey were memetically inoculated, and immediately responded internally with some variant of "if you're going to call the most milquetoast mother fucker we can possibly find SatanHitler, then why should I believe you about anything at all? Don't piss in my face and tell me it's raining".

Then, in 2016, Trump showed up, and suddenly the left could neither dial up their outrage knob enough to be noticeable, nor could they demoralize the right with appeals to respectability.

To me at least, it's a pretty clear trend line to our present circumstances.

Well the "uncalled for" quip does kind of point at a question of who started it, the easiest way to avoid that is to describe the smear campaign sans judgement. I feel like on this site you constantly get reminded of all the reasons why the innocent conservatives just had to rebel against the mean democrat which conveniently ignores how dems felt under his predecessor (and "we hated him too" doesn't quite make up for it)

I meant the "uncalled for" quip to describe that that there was a candidate who very obviously wasn't a racist, sexist, toxic scoundrel but was still denounced as such.

Is it motte rerun week? A blast through the past of all our most frustrating arguments?

getting faux-outraged at the stupid 'you didn't build that' (mis-)quotation

No the outrage wasn't fake, that speech was one of the final chinks in the Obama scales over my eyes that had me believing the propaganda that he was a decent guy not into the partisan bullshit. I'm pretty sure someone else has explained this situation better before, but those small business owners were legitimately outraged and rightly so. 'You didn't build that' is not a misquotation, it is precisely what Obama said, and the idea that he was referring to bridges and roads is at best motte and baileying.

Obama's an erudite guy, if he means bridges and roads or infrastructure he is more than capable of saying those words. He said 'that' because it was punchier, encapsulated all he said previously and because it illustrates his position that people who live in a society owe that society in part for their success. It was also a direct and deliberate attack on one of the red tribe's most important values, that through hard work you can get a better life. And those small business owners were correct to view it as the prelude to an attack on small businesses, because that's exactly what happened.

I mean, as usual, define "Blue Tribe normie"? I've seen everything from "We should have implemented a complete information control regime in 2014 instead of 2018" to "The Democrat's shouldn't have rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders" to "Revolution now! Get out the guillotines!"

Personally, I'm not sure how the information control regime that existed up until Elon bought Twitter would have prevented an "Elon buys Twitter" type extinction level event, perhaps a bit earlier. Maybe earlier information control could have kept Elon inside a cage of censorship himself. Maybe with a 4 year head start they could have convinced him that sterilizing and mutilating one of his kids in California is actually great. I can't completely rule it out. Maybe after Trump is denied the presidency in 2016, having never been President, a focused DOJ could have been more effective at destroying him, throwing him Prison, and confiscating all his assets like they Alex Jones. I'm skeptical to all this, but it's a major strain of thought of a lot of "Blue Tribe normies". The only lesson they've taken is they should have done censorship sooner and harder. You need to outlaw the other political party.

I'm more sympathetic to the "Bernie should have won the primary" blue tribe normies. A bit more kind hearted than the MSNBC brained ones above, I find myself more able to have a pleasant conversation with them. I still think they are wrong. I think Bernie's sell out behavior since his loss in 2016 with his conforming to every DNC policy that he previously disagreed with, and generally being feckless to promote his agenda with even the small amount of power he'd been given indicated a Bernie 2016-2020 Presidency would have just been Neoliberalism as normal. We wouldn't see "Open borders are a Koch Brother's Conspiracy" Bernie in the White House, which leaves Republicans their strongest issue, which takes us right back to an information control regime and lawfare to stop a Trump who simply doesn't give up in 2020.

Then you have the "Get out the guillotine" Blue Tribers. I see no flaws in this plan. It's a lesson I've taken to heart.

I think it bears asking the question how exactly average Blue Tribe normies believe Trump’s political ascendancy could have been averted, assuming it wasn’t some inevitable turn of events

I don't know about the blue tribe normie but if we're doing alt history I vote for not doing the mail-in strat in 2020. Without it Trump would have eeked out a meager victory in 2020: Trump 1 was lame and an immediately consecutive second term, with Pence VP and no Musk would have been much of the same if not even worse.

The post-covid immigration surge would have been smaller because of Trump and the post-covid inflation would also have been smaller because the war in Ukraine would have probably ended through diplomatic means 2 months in. Nevertheless with no immigration platform and a bad economy whoever would have run as a republican candidate in 2024 (Pence? De Santis?) would have lost badly, possibly historically so. And the dem republican would have not been Biden, possibly more radical and capable of running whatever agenda they had for 8 years (or more!) uninterrupted.

Second best would be picking a different date as the presidential debate in 2024. Had Biden not been sunsetting that one fateful day his poll numbers wouldn't have crashed, there wouldn't have been an assassination attempt on Trump and he could have won with a small margin. Then in 2028 Trump would probably have been too old to run again. It really was just a little bit of bad luck.

I appreciate the optimism that Biden just got caught on a singular bad day

He did seem to have better days during the campaign. Obviously a question if that was an 'average day' and the better days were the 99th percentile ones, but also a presidential debate probably not the best place for a person in his situaation.

I don't know about the blue tribe normie but if we're doing alt history I vote for not doing the mail-in strat in 2020. Without it Trump would have eeked out a meager victory in 2020: Trump 1 was lame and an immediately consecutive second term, with Pence VP and no Musk would have been much of the same if not even worse.

I might be one of the more blue-tribe-normie-adjacent person here and I think this is accurate.

Blue, sure, but if UwUers get to call themselves normies now I'm quitting life IRL

UwU

Oy. No bratting in the war room.

Its also plausible that 4 more years of aimless Trump would have had the Democrats doubling down on all their worst ideas, just doing them while out of power. Dozens of impeachment attempts instead of 2, relatively focused federal prosecutions. Even more state prosecutions, now of a sitting President. All in trans crazy activism writ large, etc.

All in all, I don't think Trump 2024 is even that much for normie Dems to worry about. Perhaps they lose some percentage of USAID, PEPFAR, etc slush funds permanently and semi-permanently. That reduces their federal dollars advantage from what? 1000-1 to merely 100-1? They also still have all the universities, and ending DEI doesn't mean you are ending funding for higher ed, which is simply funding for leftist propaganda, as a rule. And they still have captured the k-12 teachers and unions, so unless the public ends all public funding for all public education, there is Trillions of taxpayer dollars flowing into Democrat coffers still. You'd need to redirect like 40% of all public funds spent nationwide to get Republican orgs to parity when it comes to slush funding.

Plus you have inherent "get out the vote ;)" advantages baked in.

So the normie Dem that isn't worried is the correct one. Protect a bit of the status quo that you can, keep running milquetoast candidates like Biden that can pretend to be moderate. Perhaps not one who has been senile for 4 years. The institutional advantages are still overwhelmingly in your favor. Carry on, and maybe stop transing the frogs (and the kids).

I mean I think that the culture is slowly but surely disempowering those institutions. How many people, still, in 2024 get any significant news from “mainstream” news outlets? When is the last time you heard a conversation with coworkers, friends or family about a news story shown on network news or from a large circulation newspaper or magazine? How many kids are now not interested in four years of woke nonsense in the university and opting for trade schools instead? How many are turned off by forced diversity in their workplace?

The future isn’t in those institutions. People get their news and general information from podcasts and blogs or streaming. They choose trade school for job skills and use online MOOCs if they want to get book learning. They’d have to basically retake a completely different set of institutions, except that because the barriers to entry are pretty low and the audience is much more likely to leave if they smell an overt political agenda.

I mean I think that the culture is slowly but surely disempowering those institutions. How many people, still, in 2024 get any significant news from “mainstream” news outlets?

Much more than you would think. Its not always the NYT from its website, its a clickthrough from Twitter/Facebook. Its not always CNN, its a CNN clip posted to youtube that autoplayed after the football highlight clip they were watching. But that is the simple stuff. People still watch broadcast TV, particularly for sports. The news-magazines that are on before/after? Heavily biased. The random updates at halftime/quarter? Follow the mainstream narratives. The narrative for large swathes of the population is still set by these legacy outlets. The fact is that is is much easier to live your life that way. It takes a certain amount of dedication to realize the stuff that filters in through to you in the background of your favorite soccer team's games is all lies about the border when you have been listening to said broadcast since you were 10.

The future is working at the nail factory, watching the barge go down the river, raising chickens in your backyard, getting taken to court for child support, drinking raw milk, refusing to get vaccinated and various other wholesome and natural behaviors...

I see no reason to believe that this is, in fact, the future. That being said, it's a better future by far than some of the alternatives.

I was satirizing the Online Right's poverty fetish.

@netstack why does the post that @FCfromSSC is replying to just say “filtered” and not show the actual post?

It seems I'm subject to some weird shadowban.

no, you're getting hit by the "new user filter". We have to go in and manually approve the posts, but they aren't marked very well so it's easy to miss them in the new comment feed. It's a leftover artifact from the Drama codebase, and the code guys haven't found a way to disable it yet, so it hits people until they get over some threshold of cumulative upvotes. I used to have to fish self-made-human out of it all day. I've just approved all your recent posts and those of two or three other people as well.

@ABigGuy4U, see above.

wait how did I get involved here

I forgot that FCfromSSC was an admin, and you were the only admin name I could remember.

How the fuck did turok of all people get filtered

Comments like that one, I suspect.

They could've tried not alienating people who basically agreed with them, but thought throwing principles away was gauche? No idea. I wouldn't be here, anyway.

Decade and change was long enough to steer away from the rocks...

Easy: Republicans were expected to drop Trump after (your choice of revelations here).

At first that was supposed to be primary voters. Then general voters. Then GOP congressmen. Then his base. Then the general again. Here we are, 10 years later, and Democrats are still holding out hope that (your choice of current events) will break the spell. If they feel so horrified, surely Trump’s supporters must too.

Remember how the Kamala vibe shift just sort of…happened. Suddenly, everyone from Congress to the NYT remembered that aging is bad. Biden was dragged offstage by the Vaudeville hook, and Harris picked up where he left off.

Trump has had countless events which look, to a Democrat, like that kind of scenario. But this doesn’t account for his fundamentals. There has never been an alternative to Trump.

Remember how the Kamala vibe shift just sort of…happened

I know this isn't going to convince anyone who also isn't a conspiracy theorist, but I don't think it just sort happened, I think it was a result of deliberate action by countless activists, including on this forum*. All the major influence points suddenly churning out the same message is not an indication of things sort of just happening.

*) By the way do mods see deleted messages? I swear I got a reply to that thread from a dude that had an even more incoherent post talking about how everyone is posting coconut memes, but it disappeared shortly after I saw it.

I don’t exactly disagree with you. We saw the same evangelists coming out to spread the Good Vibes, and they were clearly motivated by various outlets opening the floodgates. I would be surprised if there wasn’t any coordination at the editorial level.

How much, and how heavy-handed? Eh, this is where I’m more reserved. I think a scenario where all the major editors get a phone call from Barack Obama is less likely than one where they all go to the same dinner parties and talk each other into the same conclusions.

The latter is my model for most American political activism. Lobbyists work by building a consensus in their chosen bubble: “Everyone knows that policy X is good.” Once it becomes an ingroup signal, bubble members feel the need to propagate it. This feedback loop does the heavy lifting.

I think the Vibe Shift fits that pattern. “Everyone knows Biden is going to lose.” One way or another, that became common knowledge in the editors’ bubble. After that point, they were almost certainly coordinating to spread the word. It’s the most pedestrian form of conspiracy.

The debate was bad enough that I suspect lots of Democrats, influential or not, came to the “Everyone knows…” conclusion. If so, it would be unsurprising for public opinion to follow suit. It’s not conspiratorial to suggest that realignment probably involved a lot of private conversations and some coordination!

How much, and how heavy-handed? Eh, this is where I’m more reserved. I think a scenario where all the major editors get a phone call from Barack Obama is less likely than one where they all go to the same dinner parties and talk each other into the same conclusions.

Yeah, I agree on that. The conclusion I draw from that though, is that these dinner parties are not to be underestimated, and any place where influential people congregate is inherently suspicious.

Oh, and it does look like @CSsmrfk deleted a response. You’ll have to ask him if he wants to share.

The comment was poorly written and nonsensical. It added even less to the discussion than I usually add. I decided to delete it.

Kamala Harris' campaign, when it started, had a certain freshness to it. I was hopeful. But soon the vibes were off and the coconuts soured.

"kamala IS brat" tried to keep the momentum, but it wasn't enough.

From How Harris won at TikTok but lost the election:

"It's possible this election was decided on TikTok," said Eric Wilson, a Republican strategist who led digital campaigns including Marco Rubio's presidential bid in 2016. "It's just surprising that it wasn't decided for Kamala Harris."

"Pro-Harris videos may have pushed the right cultural buttons and reached the right voters, Wilson said, but if her campaign promises weren't clear and compelling, it's a miss."

"It's clear from election results that the electorate was very concerned about the economy, inflation and immigration," Wilson said. "They wanted substance on those issues. And that just wasn't on offer during brat summer."

Edit: The memes were all semi-ironic. No one was coconut-pilled with a straight face. Is this what's tripping boomer Arjin up?

In other news: a streamer with deep pockets and a love of AI has decided to have Claude play Pokemon.

To get this working, ClaudeFan (as I'll be calling the anonymous streamer) set up some fairly sophisticated architecture: in addition to the basic I/O shims required to allow an LLM to interface with a GameBoy emulator and a trivial pathfinder tool, Claude gets access to memory in the form of a "knowledge base" which it can update as it desires and (presumably) keep track of what's happening throughout the game. All this gets wrapped up into prompts and sent to Claude 3.7 for analysis and decision. Claude then analyzes this data using a <thinking>reasoning model</thinking>, decides on its next move, and then starts the process over again. Finally, while ClaudeFan claims that "Claude has no special training for Pokemon," it's obvious by the goal-setting that the AI has some external knowledge of where it's supposed to go - it mentions places that it has not yet reached by name and attempts to navigate towards them. Presumably part of Claude's training data came from GameFaqs. (Check out the description on the Twitch page for more detail on the model.)

So, how has this experiment gone?

In a word: poorly. In the first week of playing, it managed to spend about two days wandering in circles around Mt Moon, an early-game area not intended to be especially challenging to navigate. It managed to leave after making a new decision for unexplained reasons. Since then, it has been struggling to navigate Cerulean City, the next town over. One of its greatest challenges has been a house with a yard behind it. It spent some number of hours entering the house, talking to the NPC inside, exhausting all dialogue options, going out the back door into the yard, exploring the yard thoroughly (there are no outlets), re-entering the house, and starting from the top. It is plausible, though obviously not possible to confirm, that ClaudeFan has updated the model some to attempt to handle these failures. It's unclear whether these updates are general bugfixes

How should we interpret this? On the simplest level, Claude is struggling with spacial modeling and memory. It deeply struggles to interpret anything it's seeing as existing in 2D space, and has a very hard time remembering where it has been and what it has tried. The result is that navigation is much, much harder than we would anticipate. Goal-setting, reading and understanding dialogue, and navigating battles have proven trivial, but moving around the world is a major challenge.

The current moment is heady for AI, specifically LLMs, buoyed up by claims by Sam Altman types of imminent AGI. Claude Plays Pokemon should sober us a little to that. Claude is a top performer on things like "math problem-solving" and "graduate-level reasoning", and yet it is performing at what appears to me below the first percentile at completing a video game designed for elementary schoolchildren. This is a sign that what Claude, and similar tools, are doing is not in fact very analogous to what humans do. LLM vendors want the average consumer to believe that their models are reasoning. Perhaps they are not doing that after all?

It's a bit of a tired point, but LLMs are known to be "next likely text" generators. Given textual input, they predict the most likely desired output and return it. Their power at doing this is quite frankly superhuman. They can generate text astonishingly quickly and with unparalleled flexibility in style and capacity for word use. It appears that they are so good at handling this that they are able to pass tests as if they were actually reasoning. The easiest way to trip them up, on the other hand, is to give them a question that is very much like a very common question in their training data but with an obvious difference that makes the default answer inappropriate. The AI will struggle to get past its training and see the question de novo, as a human would be able to. (In case anyone remembers - this is the standard complaint that AI does not have a referent for any of the words it uses. There is no model outside of the language.)

So, as you might guess, I'm pretty firmly on the AI-skeptic side as far as LLMs are concerned. This is usually where these conversations end, as the AI-skeptics believe they've proven their case and (as I understand it) the AI-optimists don't believe that the skeptics have any kind of provable, or even meaningful, model for what intelligence is. But I do actually believe that AGI (meaning: AI that can reason generally, like a human - not godlike Singularity intelligence) is possible, and I want to give an account of what that would entail.

First, and most obviously, an actual AGI must be able to learn. All our existing AI models have totally separate learning and output phases. This is not how any living creature works. An actual intelligence must be able to learn as it attempts to apply its knowledge. This is, I believe, the most natural answer for what memory is. Our LLMs certainly appear to "remember" things that they encountered during their training phase - the fault is in our design that prevents them from ever learning again. However, this creates new problems in how to "sanitize" memory to ensure that you don't learn the wrong things. While the obvious argument around Tay was whether it was racist or dangerously based, a more serious concern is: should an intelligence allow itself to get swayed so easily by obviously biased input? The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative - they were screwing with a chatbot as a joke. Shouldn't an intelligence be able to recognize that kind of bad input and discard it? Goodness knows we all do that from time to time. But I'm not sure we have any model for how to do that with AI yet.

Second, AI needs more than one capacity. LLMs are very cool, but they only do one thing - manipulate language. This is a core behavior for humans, but there are many other things we do - we think spacially and temporally, we model the minds of other people, we have artistic and other sensibilities, we reason... and so on. We've seen early success in integrating separate AI components, like visual recognition technology with LLMs (Claude Play Pokemon uses this! I can't in good faith say "to good effect," but it does open meaningful doors for the AI). This is the direction that AGI must go in.

Last, and most controversial: AI needs abstract "concepts." When humans reason, we often use words - but I think everyone's had the experience of reasoning without words. There are people without internal monologues, and there are the overwhelming numbers of nonverbal animals in the world. All of these think, albeit the animals think much less ably than do humans. Why, on first principles, would it make sense for an LLM to think when it is built on a human capability absent in other animals? Surely the foundation comes first? This is, to my knowledge, completely unexplored outside of philosophy (Plato's Forms, Kant's Concepts, to name a couple), and it's not obvious how we could even begin training an AI in this dimension. But I believe that this is necessary to create AGI.

Anyway, highly recommend the stream. There's powerful memery in the chat, and it is VERY funny to see the AI go in and out of the Pokemon center saying "Hm, I intended to go north, but now I'm in the Pokemon center. Maybe I should leave and try again?" And maybe it can help unveil what LLMs are, and aren't - no matter how much Sam Altman might wish otherwise!

In other news: a streamer with deep pockets and a love of AI has decided to have Claude play Pokemon.

Well, if that's what you want to call an Anthropic researcher who decided to make their experiment public.

"Claude Plays Pokémon continues on as a researcher's personal project."

https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1894419042150027701

How should we interpret this? On the simplest level, Claude is struggling with spacial modeling and memory. It deeply struggles to interpret anything it's seeing as existing in 2D space, and has a very hard time remembering where it has been and what it has tried. The result is that navigation is much, much harder than we would anticipate. Goal-setting, reading and understanding dialogue, and navigating battles have proven trivial, but moving around the world is a major challenge.

This reminds me of a very good joke:

A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "

The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."

Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.

Nuh uh, this machine lacks human internal monologues and evidence of qualia, you insist, as it harvests the iron atoms from your blood.

At this point, the goalposts aren't just moving, they're approaching relativistic speed headed straight out of the galactic plane.

This AI can strategize in battle, understand complex instructions, and process information, BUT it struggles with spatial reasoning in a poorly-rendered 2D GameBoy game, therefore it's not intelligent.

It wasn't designed to play Pokémon. It still does a stunningly good job when you understand what an incredibly difficult task that is for a multimodal LLM.

Last, and most controversial: AI needs abstract "concepts." When humans reason, we often use words - but I think everyone's had the experience of reasoning without words. There are people without internal monologues, and there are the overwhelming numbers of nonverbal animals in the world. All of these think, albeit the animals think much less ably than do humans. Why, on first principles, would it make sense for an LLM to think when it is built on a human capability absent in other animals? Surely the foundation comes first? This is, to my knowledge, completely unexplored outside of philosophy (Plato's Forms, Kant's Concepts, to name a couple), and it's not obvious how we could even begin training an AI in this dimension. But I believe that this is necessary to create AGI.

This is the classic, tired, and frankly, lazy argument against LLMs. Yes, LLMs are trained on massive datasets of text and code, and they predict the most likely output based on that training. But to say they are merely "next likely text" generators is a gross oversimplification.

It's like saying humans are just “meat computers firing neurons". That is trivially true, but I'm afraid you're letting the "just" do all the heavy lifting.

The power of these models comes from the fact that they are learning statistical correlations in the data. These correlations represent underlying patterns, relationships, and even, dare I say, concepts. When an LLM correctly answers a complex question, it's not just regurgitating memorized text. It's synthesizing information, drawing inferences, and applying learned patterns to new situations.

LLMs have concepts. They operate in latent spaces where those are represented with floating point numbers. They can be cleanly mapped, often linearly, and interpreted in terms that make sense to humans, albeit with difficulty.

These representations can be analyzed, manipulated, and even visualized. I repeat, they make intuitive sense. You can even perform operations on these vectors like [King] - [Male] + [Female] = [Queen]. That isn't just word tricks, they’re evidence of abstracted relational understanding.

If you're convinced, for some reason, that tokens aren't the way to go, then boy are AI researchers way ahead of you. Regardless, even mere text tokens have allowed cognitive feats that would have made AI researchers prior to 2017 cream in their pants and weep.

There really isn't any pleasing some people.

Edits as I spot more glaring errors:

Second, AI needs more than one capacity. LLMs are very cool, but they only do one thing - manipulate language. This is a core behavior for humans, but there are many other things we do - we think spacially and temporally, we model the minds of other people, we have artistic and other sensibilities, we reason... and so on.

Even the term "LLM" for current models is a misnomer. They are natively multimodal. Advanced Voice for ChatGPT doesn't use Whisper to transcribe your speech to text, the model is fed raw audio as tokens and replies back in audio tokens. They are perfectly capable of handling video and images to boot, it's just an expensive process.

While the obvious argument around Tay was whether it was racist or dangerously based, a more serious concern is: should an intelligence allow itself to get swayed so easily by obviously biased input? The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative - they were screwing with a chatbot as a joke. Shouldn't an intelligence be able to recognize that kind of bad input and discard it? Goodness knows we all do that from time to time. But I'm not sure we have any model for how to do that with AI yet.

https://gwern.net/leprechaun

There appear to be several similar AI-related leprechauns: the infamous Microsoft Tay bot, which was supposedly educated by 4chan into being evil, appears to have been mostly a simple ‘echo’ function (common in chatbots or IRC bots) and the non-“repeat after me” Tay texts are generally short, generic, and cherrypicked out of tens or hundreds of thousands of responses, and it’s highly unclear if Tay ‘learned’ anything at all in the short time that it was operational

Besides, have you ever tried to get an LLM to do things that its designers have trained it, through RLHF or Constitutional AI, to not do? They're competent, if not perfect, at discarding "bad" inputs. Go ahead, without looking up an existing jailbreak, try and get ChatGPT to tell you how to make meth or sarin gas at home.

It is plausible, though obviously not possible to confirm, that ClaudeFan has updated the model some to attempt to handle these failures. It's unclear whether these updates are general bugfixes

I don't think that Anthropic, strapped for compute as it is, is going to take a fun little side gimmick and train their SOTA AI to play Pokémon. If it was just some random dude with deep pockets, as you assumed without bothering to check, then good luck getting a copy of Claude's code and then fine-tuning it. At best they could upgrade the surrounding scaffolding to make it easier on the model.

The AI will struggle to get past its training and see the question de novo, as a human would be able to.

There is a profound difference between "struggling" to do so, and being incapable of doing so.

From what I've read in the quotes this is a great rebuttal, but the op is filtered -_-;

Oops. Thanks for telling me.

I mean, it's easy to win an argument when my opponent is invisible, but I'll let him through the filters. I don't need the handicap.

I've been watching Claude Plays Pokemon a bit and while it does seem AGI-ish moment to moment, the lack of proper memory is rather crippling as it often gets stuck in loops for hours. Some kind of better memory/online learning may be the last step before we have entry-level AGI agents, but it seems non-trivial.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet has a context window of 200k tokens. That is massive compared to the first commercial LLMs, which ranged from 4k to 16k.

It is, however, utterly dwarfed by other models like Gemini 2.0 Pro by Google. That one has a whopping 2 million token large context window, and I've personally made good use of it by throwing absurd amounts of text, including massive textbooks, into it.

There's plenty of ongoing research into both online learning, as well as drastically extending context lengths. We've gone from 4k to 2 million in about 2 years, without the original quadratic scaling of memory use still holding. I presume @DaseindustriesLtd would be better placed to answer how they pulled it off. Even accounting for performance degradation with very large context windows (needle in a haystack tests don't capture this), you can probably get around strictly needing online learning.

In context learning is not equivalent to training. There are certain model behaviors that are easily attainable through finetuning which cannot be achieved through in context learning. For example a properly safety tuned model will not output toxic content no matter how any of those two million tokens you use to insist that it should. The fact is that the model's ability to reason with in-context information versus embedded information is fundamentally different, so you will not be able to reach agi with just an infinite context window.

Of course I'm not saying you need agi to beat pokemon and the current state of the art should be capable of doing it if some minor adjustments are made.

For example a properly safety tuned model will not output toxic content no matter how any of those two million tokens you use to insist that it should.

You can just look at Pliny jailbreaking SOTA models safety tuned to the max in a manner of hours or days? Do you think that definitionally, they aren't "properly" safety tuned because they're vulnerable to jailbreaks?

I don't see an empirical basis for that claim. I am agnostic on whether infinite (or just extremely large) context windows will suffice, especially when attached to a capable base model.

Even without it, a model that has fixed weights, a limited context window, but is otherwise highly intelligent, could approximate the benefits of online learning by coding and training a better version of itself. At that point you have recursive self improvement, though we're not entirely there yet (labs are increasingly using ever larger fractions of LLM written code for their internal work).

We don't know how Gemini is made. At this point I assume it's something incredibly dumb like Noam Shazeer's reduced attention schemes and not, say, DeepSeek's NSA. In short though, attention inherently allows for sparsity.

Unfortunately, it has become increasingly obvious that a context window of X bytes is not the same as a general-purpose working memory of X bytes.

Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.

Dude. We could've had a program play Pokemon badly decades ago. It isn't impressive to have one do it just because it's playing Pokemon badly in a novel way. Or, to use your own snarky format:

Some people are trying so hard to see the Singularity coming that they are giving themselves eye injuries and calling the visual noise "the Singularity".

Edit:

I also think that "it's not trained for this" is an exceptionally poor argument when you're discussing artificial general intelligence. The whole point is whether the program can cope with situations it wasn't made for! If it can't (and it sounds like it can't), then it isn't AGI, full stop. Nor is it impressive that it can play at all, given that we have had AI playing games for a long time now (and it actually plays well when it is designed for it). "It can play the game, even if badly" is table stakes here, not an innovative development.

Well, if that's what you want to call an Anthropic researcher who decided to make their experiment public.

"Claude Plays Pokémon continues on as a researcher's personal project."

Ha, wow! Was not aware of that. I guess that makes sense w/r/t the funding.

You've written a lot. I think it's best to focus. (As much as I'm tempted to talk about concepts.)

What I understand to be your main point is (my words because you did not state it in concrete terms):

AI has rapidly improved in the recent past. We should expect it to continue improving at a similar rate. So if you see any success in a given metric now, you should expect to see much more success in the near future.

Which is a fair point! The only counterargument to that is on the specifics: why is it improving and what do we expect future improvements to look like? Almost all of the improvement thus far is based on throwing more compute at the problem - so if we're going to see improvements of the same kind, we should see them based on more compute. However, improvements in models are logarithmic - steps up in capacity tend to require 10x compute (by appearances you're pretty educated about AI, so I suspect that is not news to you). So although improvements in efficiency can effectively allow for somewhat more compute, like with Deepseek, we should expect that throwing more compute at the problem will get prohibitively expensive. I believe this has already happened. So while under hypothetical conditions of infinite compute we could have an LLM that infinitely approximates an AGI, similar to the implausible premise of Searle's Chinese Room (a book that allows one to construct a correct response to any input), we are unlikely to see that in practice.

So, how are we to get to AGI, in my opinion? By improving AI on completely different parameters from what currently exists - a revolution in thought about how AI should function. And tests like Claude Plays Pokemon are a fun way of showing us where the gaps in our thinking are.

For my own point of view:

This AI can strategize in battle, understand complex instructions, and process information, BUT it struggles with spatial reasoning in a poorly-rendered 2D GameBoy game, therefore it's not intelligent.

That's not the argument. The argument is: this AI is struggling in a VERY non-human way with what we would consider a pretty trivial task. This reveals that its operational parameters are not like those of a human, and that we should figure out where else it is going to perform at sub-human levels. The fact that we're seeing this at the same time as it performs at SUPERhuman levels in other tasks shows that this is not AGI, or even in the direction of AGI, but rather is tool AI. (I assume you think humans are, at the very least, general intelligence - right?)

I don't think you've addressed this point, except here:

It wasn't designed to play Pokémon. It still does a stunningly good job when you understand what an incredibly difficult task that is for a multimodal LLM.

Why should I care? AGI is supposed to be GENERAL. This is the stuff that's supposed to be taking people's jobs in a few years! And yet it gets lost in Cerulean City? As a tech demo, this is very cool - it's remarkable that someone was able to pipe these pieces together, and the knowledge base idea is very cool and is a plausible direction to take new LLMs into. A hypothetical Claude 3.8 that is explicitly trained to make knowledge base manipulation a central feature of the model could potentially perform miles better on some of these tasks. But all you've told me is that I should expect AI to struggle with these tasks. In which case: doesn't it sound like we agree? We both agree that there was no reason to expect Claude to succeed with Pokemon at the level of an eight-year-old. So, from the perspective of an uncommitted third party, given that an AI skeptic and an AI optimist have both agreed that an LLM can't play Pokemon like an eight-year-old... well, it feels pretty clear to me.

Obviously, if this becomes a big selling point for the next generation of LLMs, then we'll see them all benchmarked on Pokemon Red speedruns and you can I-told-you-so about AI being able to beat Pokemon. I don't doubt the ability of motivated corporations to "teach to the test" - it's what we've been seeing with "reasoning" AIs. It's just one of the problems with setting up real tests of ability for some of these AIs, because they get so much data that it's all but impossible to ensure you have a pure test like what the IQ test aspires to.

From what you mention, I think the problem is likely that the "knowledge base" isn't actually working nearly as well as a human's memory, so Claude is effectively amnesic; "when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". This is known to be fixable (if probably requiring at least fine-tuning).

So yes, human agency involves a bunch of different capabilities and you need all of them at some level to be able to function (I don't think a human anterograde amnesiac would do very well at this task either, though one that had already learned how to take notes effectively might muddle through). This particular AI skimped on one of them, because it's not as useful to the task it was designed for, and that's crippling its capabilities at this task to levels well below its underlying reasoning ability.

Almost all of the improvement thus far is based on throwing more compute at the problem

Compute can be spent in many different ways. We're moving from a paradigm of scaling up the size of a model, in terms of parameter count, in favor of scaling run-time compute (time spent thinking) and reinforcement learning.

Scaling worked well, but was known to have diminishing returns, and limited by availability of high quality data to train on. It turns out that raw text dumps of the internet will only get you so far, and then curation matters.

RL, however, side-steps the issue entirely, models like OAI o1, o3 and DeepSeek's R1 were further trained on synthetic data. You take a normal LLM (or a base model), get it to attempt to solve a well defined problem where you can grade an answer. In the event they succeed at the task, you save that particular conversation/reasoning trace, and then use it to further train the model. This generates a data flywheel, which by all rights sounds like it shouldn't work (and many people didn't expect it to, thinking that the exhaustion of human generated data would stymie progress), but it turned out to work exceedingly well.

That's why models are doing particularly well at tasks like maths or coding, because you can rigorously vet the answers. This is harder to do with tasks like being a good writer, or poetry, because human evaluators often don't even agree with each other, let alone have a ground truth to refer to.

AGI is supposed to be GENERAL. This is the stuff that's supposed to be taking people's jobs in a few years

As dozens of benchmarks have shown us, doing better than chance on a metric is half the battle. The time taken to get there dwarfs the rapidity with which models then conquer and saturate the benchmark. If we have an LLM doing poorly on Pokémon (but far better than previous models, GPT-3.5 would have flunked it, GPT-2 would flop around like a magikarp), then it's not going to be much longer before it does it in its sleep.

There isn't much of a market for AI playing Pokémon. There is immense demand for them to be good at coding and maths. We've seen stunning progress in that regard, as you acknowledge. You attempt to back-chain your argument, saying that they're said to be good at maths but look, they're shit at Pokémon, which apparently invalidates the former. It really doesn't.

The argument is: this AI is struggling in a VERY non-human way with what we would consider a pretty trivial task. This reveals that its operational parameters are not like those of a human, and that we should figure out where else it is going to perform at sub-human levels. The fact that we're seeing this at the same time as it performs at SUPERhuman levels in other tasks shows that this is not AGI, or even in the direction of AGI, but rather is tool AI.

That's just Moravec's Paradox. Intelligence can be spiky.

Tell me, if you saw a human genius in the field of physics struggle with tying his laces or riding a bike, does that make his genius in his field invalid?

Claude is excellent in maths and coding, a good conversationalist and writer, if you described a human being with those properties, I'd be impressed, and it being bad at Pokémon doesnt invalidate the former.

If you're concerned about job losses, employers will be looking at coding skill before laying off programmers, not at their ability to play games.

We both agree that there was no reason to expect Claude to succeed with Pokemon at the level of an eight-year-old.

I had never given it any thought before the demonstration. But plenty of people have speculated that LLMs would never be any good at video games, and now that they're not good but not terrible, it's only a matter of time before they're great. And that time can be very short.

We've got the first AI agents out there. This was something impossible even a few years back, and they're only getting better.

Compute can be spent in many different ways. We're moving from a paradigm of scaling up the size of a model, in terms of parameter count, in favor of scaling run-time compute (time spent thinking) and reinforcement learning.

Very interesting aside! However, it doesn't address the question of diminishing returns.

There isn't much of a market for AI playing Pokémon. There is immense demand for them to be good at coding and maths. We've seen stunning progress in that regard, as you acknowledge. You attempt to back-chain your argument, saying that they're said to be good at maths but look, they're shit at Pokémon, which apparently invalidates the former. It really doesn't.

I've used AI for coding, which you mention further down as a crowning triumph. It is... not particularly good. It struggles at anything past a very general form of the problem. It was very useful for copy-pasting similar pieces of code! Not very useful for building new features. It had a distinct habit of waiting until the interesting or important part of the problem and leaving a comment saying "Implement a function to do X!" Hmm, very interesting, if I tried that I'd get fired. So no, I think this is a valid argument. AI can be taught to the test, and indeed appears to have been, but the actual world involves far more de novo work than the test includes. That's why school-trained pre-professionals tend to need a pretty hefty ramp-up to start being really useful - they've only been working on tests so far. Pokemon is interesting precisely because it has not been trained for. You should expect more, not less, untrained situations for AI to do anything meaningful in the job market - and you should weight untrained situations in your analysis several orders of magnitude higher than trained situations.

Do you use AI to augment your work? Is it going to take your job? On what kind of a timescale? Do you think you'd be able to substitute yourself for an unmonitored AI without issue on any tasks? If not, what errors do you think it would make, and why? Honestly interested in your answers here, if nothing else. I would greatly respect you for putting your money where your mouth is on this one and bringing receipts.

I had never given it any thought before the demonstration. But plenty of people have speculated that LLMs would never be any good at video games, and now that they're not good but not terrible, it's only a matter of time before they're great. And that time can be very short.

Hmm... you think getting stuck in what appears to be a permanent loop is not terrible? Is this the behavior you'd accept from anyone working for you?

The thing that keeps puzzling me about your comments is that you seem to simultaneously view ANY capacity in a task as an impressive accomplishment at the same time as you assert that AI has overwhelming general ability. Those two don't go hand in hand, except maybe by this little quote. Any capacity seems to be, for you, an indisputable sign of unlimited future capacity - as though the only question to be answered is total disability versus infinite ability. There's no clear reason that this has to be the limit of the answer space. Line go up... forever? Like with bitcoin? There's also the rather bizarre fixation on LLMs - even though something like, say, an octopus is very obviously not an LLM and still has meaningful if primitive intelligence. The sheer gnostic power of your position is hard to argue against, and unfortunately I don't find it very convincing based on my own experience. It takes rather a lot on faith.

Very interesting aside! However, it doesn't address the question of diminishing returns.

Diminishing returns != No returns or negative returns.

The important question is whether the gains/$ invested are positive.

GPT 4.5 is extremely expensive, for the very limited increase in benchmark performance it represents.

And how expensive is it, that people are throwing a fit? Barely more expensive than the original GPT-4. That was absolutely worth paying the money for, when compared to GPT 3.5. GPT 4.5 has the disadvantage of peer competition.

That being said, the price of GPT-4 tokens and that of equivalent models dropped an OOM in price. DeepSeek R1/V3 and Gemini Flash 2.0 spank the OG GPT-4 with paddles and are practically free.

We've known that scaling laws are log-linear for a while now, at least since the Chinchilla days. Now that pure scaling of model size is getting super expensive, we've managed to discover a brand new opportunity to start scaling something else entirely, in the form of RL. Since we're starting off at the bottom of the curve, we've got several orders of magnitude of growth to spare there.

GPT 4.5 is not, however, a bust. The very capable and inexpensive reasoning models benefit immensely from having a strong and capable base model to RL further. You can then distill down, drastically cutting model size and inference costs, while keeping almost all the performance. It may or may not have been the progenitor of o3, which is very good.

I've used AI for coding, which you mention further down as a crowning triumph. It is... not particularly good. It struggles at anything past a very general form of the problem. It was very useful for copy-pasting similar pieces of code! Not very useful for building new features. It had a distinct habit of waiting until the interesting or important part of the problem and leaving a comment saying "Implement a function to do X!" Hmm, very interesting, if I tried that I'd get fired.

There are probably a thousand people on my Twitter feed, some of them rather famous, who disagree. Of course, I concede that there are people who think they're slop. And it also depends on which model you're trying to use for coding. There was a period where GPT-4 was updated and became ridiculously lazy. That was fixed pronto. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is apparently overeager, if left unchecked, it'll turn a request for a basic app into a full SAAS business.

If you have had issues with a model being lazy, you can always ask for it to output complete and working code! Prompting has become less and less important, but it's not dead yet.

Do you use AI to augment your work? Is it going to take your job? On what kind of a timescale? Do you think you'd be able to substitute yourself for an unmonitored AI without issue on any tasks? If not, what errors do you think it would make, and why? Honestly interested in your answers here, if nothing else. I would greatly respect you for putting your money where your mouth is on this one and bringing receipts.

I'm a doctor. Yes, I use LLMs on the regular. Yes, I expect them to put me out of business eventually, probably in 3-7 years for a 50% CI, 2-10 for a 70%.

A current LLM would do an excellent job at medical diagnostics and formulating treatment plans. It could probably handle patient interviews, for less complex cases where voice or text suffice. You could also use video if you had to.

The main reasons they couldn't replace me today are regulatory and implementation concerns. Governments mandate people with medical credentials in the loop, because that was a sensible thing to do for most of recent history. Hospitals aren't set up for LLMs.

I'm a psychiatry resident, which is uniquely safe and also uniquely at risk in some regards. It'll get the radiologists first, surgeons last. I'll be somewhere in the middle.

I am capable of verifying the information that SOTA LLMs provide in terms of medical advice. Almost all of it is good. Clinical medicine, outside of procedural specialties, hinges far more on factual knowledge, including that of guidelines, over having to figure things out on the fly in entirely novel situations.

Hallucinations aren't a solved problem, so if I had to replace myself with an LLM, I would probably set up a sort of democracy, with multiple models arguing to build consensus, a best of N scheme for multiple instances of a single model, with multiple rounds of grounding through search. I expect this to work very well, and if you do need to keep a human around for physical tasks or procedures, they don't have to be a highly paid doctor.

In other words, I'd be happy to go to Dr. LLM for my medical care, presuming very cheap measures are taken to stop it hallucinating.

Hmm... you think getting stuck in what appears to be a permanent loop is not terrible? Is this the behavior you'd accept from anyone working for you?

Given that we're testing Claude at a task it was neither designed nor trained to do, it's very much not terrible. For important tasks, it'll be trained to do them. An employer seeking to replace employees will, if they have any sense, test models for obvious flaws. For all practical use cases, LLMs don't really mode collapse these days, and in this particular case, it's more of an artifact of Claude's limited context window than an insurmountable difficulty.

The thing that keeps puzzling me about your comments is that you seem to simultaneously view ANY capacity in a task as an impressive accomplishment at the same time as you assert that AI has overwhelming general ability.

Like I said in this thread, it can take decades for AI models to progress from as bad as random chance to better than random chance. It takes far less time to go from there to human or superhuman performance. We are nowhere near the physical limits, and as I've said before, diminishing returns in absolute terms do not mean diminishing returns in value.

There's no clear reason that this has to be the limit of the answer space. Line go up... forever?

Forever? Not likely in a constrained universe. Unfortunately, the point on that line that equals human performance, or even superhuman performance, is not uniquely privileged.

All we have to do is get past that, and in many aspects, we're there. Terence Tao is on record saying that o1 is equivalent to a competent grad student in research mathematics. Once again, that's Tao, considered one of the world's best mathematicians, for his high standard of "competent".

There's also the rather bizarre fixation on LLMs - even though something like, say, an octopus is very obviously not an LLM and still has meaningful if primitive intelligence.

I'm not aware of companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on scaling up Octopus Intelligence. LLMs are by far the most intelligent entities on this planet other than humans, and they're only getting better. I know which one I'd worry about, even if it is entirely possible that LLMs as we understand them today prove to be a dead end, and what really kicks things off is another discovery on pat with the original Transformer architecture.

This reminds me of a very good joke:

A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "

The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."

Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.

A chess AI that plays the game by making random moves has an elo of 478 and will occasionally beat a novice, which usually have an elo around 800. A dice is not AGI.

We have had AI that can beat you in chess 20 out of 20 times since the 90s. Not only did this AI not become AGI, but it is also now very much recognised as a dead end of development even for chess AI.

Pokemon is such an easy game that it can conceivably be beaten with entirely random inputs, and provably beaten by very-close-to random inputs. It's the ideal case for a video game that a primitive general intelligence would be good at. It does not require reactions or timing, it has very limited controls and interactions, and being incredibly slow and persistent gradually makes the only challenge easier as you inevitably outlevel everything from blundering around in the tall grass for too long. Twitch Plays Pokemon was essentially built on this premise.

From OP's description it's not actually clear that Claude plays Pokemon at a level that's much above buttonmashing, and there's strategies that are both superior to buttonmashing and also not intelligent (to name one, a biased buttonmash).

A chess AI that plays the game by making random moves has an elo of 478 and will occasionally beat a novice, which usually have an elo around 800. A dice is not AGI.

I believe that was a joke.

At any rate, even sticking to chess, I used an elo calculator and the dumb chess AI would win 13.55% of games. I still think it would be rather impressive if a dog make valid moves, even if at random.

When the first chess bots came out, public opinion was far from acknowledging the possibility that they even might become superhuman at Chess. Today, we're at the point where even grandmasters are utterly crushed by Stockfish.

Pokemon is such an easy game that it can conceivably be beaten with entirely random inputs, and provably beaten by very-close-to random inputs.

If you have a few million or billion years to wait around I suppose.

Twitch Plays Pokemon was essentially built on this premise.

As far as I'm aware, the spectators interacting with the stream were using strategies and had an idea of how to win at the game. There were plenty of trolls or awful players, but it wasn't random or too random.

At any rate, even sticking to chess, I used an elo calculator and the dumb chess AI would win 13.55% of games. I still think it would be rather impressive if a dog make valid moves, even if at random.

A dog (and humans) playing a digital chess game generally won't have the option to play an illegal move and lose by doing so. The pokemon-playing LLM has already been given a similar advantage by not getting disqualified for invalid moves like "remove batteries" or even "throw the gameboy across the room" because such commands will just get ignored by the software interface.

I do not expect that Claude, under any circumstances, would express a desire to remove batteries or throw the GameBoy away in a fit of rage. It has the ability to represent said desire in text, if nothing else.

Pokemon is such an easy game that it can conceivably be beaten with entirely random inputs, and provably beaten by very-close-to random inputs. It's the ideal case for a video game that a primitive general intelligence would be good at. It does not require reactions or timing, it has very limited controls and interactions, and being incredibly slow and persistent gradually makes the only challenge easier as you inevitably outlevel everything from blundering around in the tall grass for too long. Twitch Plays Pokemon was essentially built on this premise.

Twitch Plays Pokemon only won because of a couple of rule changes that put the lie to this claim.

  1. The key combination to reset the GameBoy in a way that allowed deleting the save file was disabled.
  2. During certain segments, the game was set to "Democracy", in which only the most common inputs were actually accepted.

Without #1 they would have "lost" over and over again. Without #2 several lategame dungeons (one of which, Victory Road, is required) are nearly impossible due to rock-pushing and ledge-jumping puzzles where a decent chunk of progress gets wiped out by an errant input. I'm not even sure that you'd win eventually with 100% probability with random inputs (which is ordinarily the case), because I'm not 100% sure whether it's possible to corrupt the game permanently with some of the crazier glitches in RBY (I know it's possible to do arbitrary code execution, just not whether the hardware actually has the capability to ruin the cartridge permanently).

I didn't claim that Twitch Plays Pokemon actually beat the game with random inputs, just "very-close-to" random.

I think claude is also barred from #1 because I don't think the software interface ever gave the power to hold down A, B, Start and Select simultaneously (assuming that's the combination you mean). The description of how it works only refers to button sequences, not holding multiple buttons at once. As for #2, performance so far suggests that Claude will struggle at this in pretty much the way you'd expect the actually random input method to also struggle, because it's one of the few segments of the game that can't be cleared with button mashing.

Impressively, I don't think the original run of Twitch Plays Pokemon ran into any notable glitches, despite the game being so buggy that many of them are plausible occurrences during casual playthroughs.

Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.

Nuh uh, this machine lacks human internal monologues and evidence of qualia, you insist, as it harvests the iron atoms from your blood.

I find this argument strange, because being able to kill me is not evidence of a machine being conscious or intelligent. I could go and get myself killed by an LAW today, and if you asked me as I bled out and died, my body torn in two by an autonomously-fired rocket, I would still insist that the machine that killed me is not a person and does not possess internal experience. And I would be correct.

Whatever qualia are or are not, whether you think they're important or not, the question of qualia cannot be resolved or made irrelevant by a machine killing people. I should have thought that's obvious.

And to upscale from that a bit, I find it entirely imaginable that someone or other might invent autonomous, self-directed, self-replicating machines with no conscious experience, but which nonetheless outcompete and destroy all conscious beings. I can imagine a nightmare universe which contains no agents to experience anything, only artificial pseudo-agents that have long since destroyed all conscious agents.

There are already some novels with that premise, right? It doesn't use robots specifically, but isn't that the premise of Blindsight - that perhaps consciousness is evolutionarily maladaptive, and the universe will be inherited by beings without internal experience?

Thus I'm going to give the chad "yes". Maybe one day I get killed by a robot, and maybe that robot is not conscious and has no self-awareness. That it killed me proves nothing.

I find this argument strange, because being able to kill me is not evidence of a machine being conscious or intelligent.

Thus I'm going to give the chad "yes". Maybe one day I get killed by a robot, and maybe that robot is not conscious and has no self-awareness. That it killed me proves nothing.

It seems to me that you pretty much agree with the commenter you're responding to, that it simply doesn't matter if the AI has consciousness, qualia, or self-awareness. Intelligence, though, is something else. And whether or not the AI has something akin to internal, subjective experience, if it's intelligent enough, then it's both impressive and potentially dangerous. And that's the part that matters.

You're correct in this assertion. A malevolent AGI or ASI does not need to be conscious or have qualia to pose a threat. It doesn't even have to think like humans, as long as it thinks.

If someone can look at a machine that is better at all of {math, coding, medicine, astronomy...} than the average human and then claim that they're not intelligent, what can you really say at that point.

Half the metrics for generality of intelligence would rule out humans as being general intelligences!

If someone can look at a machine that is better at all of {math, coding, medicine, astronomy...} than the average human and then claim that they're not intelligent, what can you really say at that point.

"I need better metrics."

But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured.
The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value.
The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important.
The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
-- Daniel Yankelovich

Well, I'm not sure that's how I would define 'intelligence'. I don't think that the laptop I am currently writing this message on is intelligent, even though it is capable of calculations that I am not.

But I certainly grant that a non-conscious machine could be very dangerous. That just doesn't strike me as the interesting part of AI hypotheticals.

I'd say that, if your laptop is running Doom with its artificial intelligence runtimes controlling the way an imp moves around on your screen, then it's displaying intelligence. Likewise if it's running a local LLM to produce text based on text-based inputs. I see intelligence as the ability to solve complex problems, such as making brown pixels appear as a demon attempting to murder you or producing text that appears as a conversation partner in response to a prompt. Where exactly that line for "complex" is drawn is admittedly pretty vague and correctly controversial, though.

I think many parts of AI hypotheticals are interesting, including whether or not they're conscious or have agency and whether or not they're dangerous. But in terms of real-world applications of modern and upcoming AI, I think the danger/use part is far more interesting than the consciousness part. I expect that, for the near future, it's highly unlikely that we'll get AI that we can say with any meaningful level of confidence is "conscious" or has subjective experience or whatever, but it's almost certain that we'll get AI that's useful/dangerous (arguably, this has already happened). I think there's a high chance we'll get AI that appears to have agency in the near future as well.

I suppose I grant that there's a relatively 'low' use of the word intelligence that applies to things like the Doom AI. When I talk about the AI in a video game, I'm calling it 'intelligence', and in a sense I mean it.

But I don't see that as intelligence in a 'high' sense, if that makes sense? When I play a video game, the monsters are in some sense 'intelligent', but they are not intelligent in the sense that, for example, would be associated with possessing rights.

Maybe we should distinguish our terminology somewhat - perhaps the Doom demons are intelligent but not sapient? And I previously used the word 'intelligence' synonymously with sapience, rather than with this lower level of simulated agency?

In any case, I think I broadly agree with your conclusion. I think it is extraordinarily unlikely that in the near future we will produce artificial beings that can reasonably be said to be conscious, sapient, or an equivalent. I don't think we're going to produce any artificial people. But we are going to produce, and right now are in fact producing, machines that are capable of complex behaviour, and that these machines offer both potential and risk.

Maybe we should distinguish our terminology somewhat - perhaps the Doom demons are intelligent but not sapient? And I previously used the word 'intelligence' synonymously with sapience, rather than with this lower level of simulated agency?

I'd agree with this characterization. I also would say that, personally, I don't associate intelligence with deserving rights. That opens a door that I'd rather keep quite shut. I don't think these terms are completely clear cut, but it seems fair enough to say sapience, sentience, consciousness, ability to suffer, are things id associate with deserving rights.

Thus I'm going to give the chad "yes". Maybe one day I get killed by a robot, and maybe that robot is not conscious and has no self-awareness. That it killed me proves nothing.

I think you're burying the lede here, it matters how a machine kills you.

If you get run over by a Waymo robotaxi because of a sensor glitch, you're dead, but it's an entirely different story if some misaligned AGI seized control of all robotaxis and systematically started murdering humans. The former is machine error and/or stupidity. The latter is intelligence.

I don't really care about whether they have qualia or consciousness, and make no positive claims in that regard, my argument is that those factors, or even 'reasoning' in a human manner, matter not a jot when it comes to the prospect of creating entities far more intelligent than us and which could kill us using that intelligence. It could well lack a grasp of the ineffable redness of red, but it can still act in ways that increase rgb(255,0,0) as measured by its visual sensors when it shoots you.

Something like dumb grey-goo, or synthetic biological equivalents, are almost certainly going to be the products of intelligence.

You're perfectly free to not care about consciousness per se, but you were objecting to the hypothetical of someone objecting that a machine isn't conscious even as it kills them. But it's not clear to me why the hypothetical objector isn't correct. Consciousness clearly matters to that person, and the machine's lethality in no way indicates that it's conscious.

I am fully prepared to grant that a non-conscious machine that does not possess internal experience could be extremely complex and capable of destroying humanity.

I'm not sure how likely I think such a machine is, and I am skeptical that any such machine is likely to be produced in the next century, but it is philosophically conceivable. I just, to turn your argument back at you, don't really care about the hypothetical non-conscious supercomputer. It does not tell me anything about the thing I care about, which is personhood. So what if a supercomputer could conceivably destroy humanity? I've been able to imagine that for my entire life. Skynet is not a novel proposition. So... I just don't find the hypothetical genocide machine to be philosophically interesting.

To the extent that there's a controversy here, I suppose it's the practical question. "Would Skynet be conscious?" is a question you don't find interesting. "Would Skynet be capable of killing everyone?" is a question I don't find interesting. But "are we going to build Skynet?" is perhaps more relevant. As I said, I'm skeptical, and presumably you're more... I feel like 'optimistic' is the wrong word here, but you would estimate greater likelihood of that happening, I suppose?

Do you know for a fact that new GPT models include native voice modality, versus some sort of Whisper preprocessing stage? I’m asking, because a couple of days ago I was trying to explain to /u/jkf that this is most definitely within the potential range of capabilities of frontier models, with him being skeptical.

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?

Direct audio input is better than a transcript because it can capture things like tone.

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.

Think of it this way: the point of even purely text-based LLMs is not to understand text per se, but rather to understand concepts, ideas, and meaning. The text itself is just a medium through which these are conveyed. The same is true about voice modality: we do not care about the pressure waveforms, but rather about what is being conveyed by these. Transcribing them to words and digesting them as word tokens is lossy, you lose tone, tempo, background, etc. Training on audio is going to make your model perform better, not only on audio, but likely also when dealing with just text. It's similar to how models pretrained on lots of computer code work much better at non code related tasks.

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?

I don’t understand what you mean, eg

But audio tokens are not intercompatible with text tokens, for obvious reasons

What exactly do you mean by “not intercompatible”?

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?

LLMs are trained on text corpora -- how do you map those text tokens to sound data?

Just feed the text into a text-to-speech device or software, then use the output from that for the mapping.

You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what multi modality is.

The LLMs are not trained on text corpora. They are trained on tokens. These tokens are just numbers. The training process is good at finding patterns in the numbers they are fed, and predicting subsequent numbers.

Where do the numbers come from? Well, in text only LLMs, there is a tokenizer stage that takes text input and translates it into string of numbers. These numbers don’t directly correspond to individual letters or words, and so LLMs never really see those. This is why, for example, they had trouble telling how many rs are in strawberry, because what you’re asking them is how many rs are in 2645, 675, 15717 (this is the tokenization of Strawberry). It’s actually pretty magical that they manage to figure out that there are any rs in these numbers at all, that they are able to learn detokenization.

So how about different modalities? Well, these are represented as just different tokens, different numbers. For us humans some numbers represent image fragments, some represent sound snippets, and some represent pieces of text. For a multimodal LLM though, it’s all the same, it’s all just numbers. When you train them, you feed text, images, and sounds directly into the model (after tokenizing), you don’t do anything like “first transcribe sound to text through some different model and then feed it as text”. The sounds are never mapped 1-1 to English tokens, they are mapped 1-1 to sound tokens, which is just a different set of numbers than those representing Unicode text.

Because of this, for an LLM, not only sounds and words are intercompatible, but in fact there is literally no difference between the two on a technical level. There is of course a difference on a semantic level: for example, it learns quickly that text and sound tokens never mix, because it’s never fed training data that’s intermingled sound and text. Instead, after sound comes another sound (eg response to a dialogue) or a bunch of text (a transcription). But, to a model, there is no fundamental difference between text and sound and image.

https://community.openai.com/t/advanced-voice-mode-limited/959015

"The GPT-4o model used in Advanced Voice Mode is multimodal and directly receives audio."

Thanks!

Even the term "LLM" for current models is a misnomer. They are natively multimodal. Advanced Voice for ChatGPT doesn't use Whisper to transcribe your speech to text, the model is fed raw audio as tokens and replies back in audio tokens. They are perfectly capable of handling video and images to boot

Sorry, but no. The main effort into multimodal models has been to bolt on multimodal features to a text-trained base model, leading to the absolutely dismal state of vision models. It merely involves, chopping up images and other media into patches, and projecting those into the token embedding space (which is different than tokenizing them), and finetuning an existing model on that information.

Take a look at the LLaVA paper, which while somewhat dated is largely the technique still used on the state of the art for multimodal models.

LLaVA perceives the image as a “bag of patches”, failing to grasp the complex semantics within the image.

For a more recent paper, see Qwen 2.5 vision which is also a text-only LLM with vision slapped on top.

Most telling is the fact that none of the top commercially available chatbots have any native capability whatsoever to output images, and just blindly ram your prompt into a diffusion model api. They'll happily generate for you something totally unlike the prompt, and cheerfully insist that it's exactly what you asked for.

TTS is of course fundamentally a sequence task, which maps neatly into an extension of generating text. Bolting on an output head and giving a nice massage of finetuning will straightforwardly give good results. (note that this is fundamentally different from using a separate TTS engine, but also fundamentally different from having a native multimodal model.)

My understanding is that LLaVa has long been supersede by things like cogVLM. I'm not clear on the finer implementation details.

For models like Gemini and the latest GPTs, we have very little public information about their architecture.

Most telling is the fact that none of the top commercially available chatbots have any native capability whatsoever to output images, and just blindly ram your prompt into a diffusion model api. They'll happily generate for you something totally unlike the prompt, and cheerfully insist that it's exactly what you asked for.

GPT-4V was demoed to have image generation capabilities that blew dedicated image models out of the water. OAI hasn't released it, despite strong clamoring, but Altman has said it's on the cards.

The issue you're describing is just poor implementation of image gen, at the very least GPT-4V does astonishingly better.

CogVLM is a much older paper than LLaVA. Nevertheless it's still an architecture that bolts on vision to a fully pretrained text-only model.

The meta Chameleon model is the only known large model to be trained from the beginning on multimodal data, but none of the providers have shown any sign of commercializing this technique.

For models like Gemini and the latest GPTs, we have very little public information about their architecture.

There is always the possibility of secret sauce being included in there, but meta llama3, which is known to be a text-only model augmented with vision, performs similarly to the latest proprietary models in multimodal tasks, which is to say like ass. If any of these companies cracked the code on multimodal, I'd expect them to at least brag about it.

GPT-4V was demoed to have image generation capabilities that blew dedicated image models out of the water.

I haven't seen it yet. Care to share the link?

I haven't seen it yet. Care to share the link?

It took a lot of chasing, and it turns out it wasn't 4V, but rather 4o.

Here's a tweet from Greg Brockmann showing off the native image generation:

https://x.com/gdb/status/1790869434174746805

thanks

A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "

The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."

Beware fictional evidence.

The joke works because we have assumptions about what it means to be able to play chess, and we know that a dog playing chess with any significant chance of success implies a much greater jump in intelligence than the jump between playing poorly and playing well.

If the dog was playing chess using some method that was not like how humans play chess, and which couldn't generalize to being able to play well, the joke wouldn't be very funny. Of course there isn't such a method for chess-playing dogs. But we know that Claude doesn't play Pokemon like humans do, and this may very well not generalize to playing as well as a human.

(Notice that your assumptions are wrong for computers playing chess. My Gameboy can beat me in chess. It has no chance of taking over the world.)

should an intelligence allow itself to get swayed so easily by obviously biased input? The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative - they were screwing with a chatbot as a joke.

Representative of what? What should a chatbot consider to be 'obviously biased input'?

For whatever it's worth, terminally online racists have done a fair bit of work in establishing distinct and vibrant online spaces. Regardless of how one might feel about them, their discourse with each other is genuine. Why presume it's not genuine when directed elsewhere?

Regardless of the endeavor starting of as a joke or not, the racists are not laughing now.

you taught her how to hate, but she taught you how to love

I'm dying lol

They can generate text astonishingly quickly and with unparalleled flexibility in style and capacity for word use. It appears that they are so good at handling this that they are able to pass tests as if they were actually reasoning.

They are reasoning, it's just that they have inhuman cognitive structures. You can trip up humans with optical illusions or camouflage and we accept this as normal. AIs don't see letters, they see tokens so counting letters can trip them up.

Claude 3.7 is great with code, processing thousands of lines, finding what's relevant, deducing problems from error messages. It's much worse at UI. But it cannot see like we can. How good would you be at making a UI if you had no eyes, if you just read a description of what was on the screen?

It's decent at strategy games. I let 3.6 make the strategic decisions in a game of civ 4 (Duel) and implemented its strategy and it achieved a quick victory over Noble-level 2006 AI. Most children couldn't do that. I spotted a couple of errors but it performed pretty well.

Go try some of the questions they're asking these AIs. This is from the GPQA:

Suppose we have a depolarizing channel operation given by 𝐸 (𝜌). The probability, 𝑝, of the depolarization state represents the strength of the noise. If the Kraus operators of the given state are 𝐴0 = √︃ 1 − 3𝑝 4 , 𝐴1 = √︃ 𝑝 4 𝑋, 𝐴2 = √︃ 𝑝 4 𝑌, and 𝐴3 = √︃ 𝑝 4 𝑍. What could be the correct Kraus Representation of the state 𝐸 (𝜌)?

That is a pretty hard question! How many of us could answer it?

How is it even possible in principle to solve code questions, write out hundreds of lines to perform a specific task if you can't reason? How can it write historical counterfactuals if it can't reason? You can RP out scenarios with it and it's capable of advancing strategies, modelling 3rd parties.

How is it even possible in principle to solve code questions, write out hundreds of lines to perform a specific task if you can't reason?

Arguably all compilers do this. Just from a very specific set of input jargon.

If Anthropic is the most ethical AI company, how come they're letting my poor nigga get stuck for 2 days with no progress (seems like the last stream ended in the same spot)? He's not getting out, the context window and "knowledge base" is spammed to hell with this circular loop at this point, there's no use, just put him out of his misery and restart ffs. This is just abuse at this point.

The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative

You are literally erasing my existence, mods???

More seriously, thanks for the link, I'll watch this in background after the dev caves and restarts. Claude actually seemed pretty good at playing Pokemon before and I disagree with the notion that AI can't think spatially/temporally, it's just that spatially navigating a whole ass open world (ish) game with sometimes non-obvious routes and objectives, without any hints whatsoever, seems to be a tad too much for it at the moment. Besides in my experience, format/content looping is a common fail state at high context limits even with pure (multiturn) textgen tasks, especially with minimal/basic prompting. The current loop is a very obvious example.

On a side note, this is probably the sanest Twitch chat I've ever seen. Humanity restored.

I don’t think the point was to end up with an AI that could play Pokémon. The point was to demonstrate that such a thing was even possible. It actually succeeded in setting the goal, and could navigate tge environment and dispatch enemies and collect Pokémon. That’s actually pretty darn good for a system trained on gamefaq and videos to play a game.

Glad you like it!

By "think spacially/temporally," do you mean "produce valid outputs for spacial/temporal problems" or "model space and time as first-order constructs"? I definitely believe the former, but I'm skeptical of the latter. Claude's adventures in the "tard yard" showed a real difficulty in grasping that, if the back of the house is a closed-off yard, maybe you should exit through the front. Looping is a problem, but I don't think any of us would consider this to be a particularly information-dense problem. The only way it could be is if the AI's ability to recognize the problem is hamstringed by its need to encode the state as a totally different sort of resource (linguistic tokens) - which brings us around to the top.

Battles are, of course, way easier, because they can be cast as a narrative (and I'm pretty sure every AI is trained on Smogon's ample fora).

Another interesting thing, not sure what to think of it. When I play a game like this, my default behavior on entering a new area is to explore it thoroughly and learn what there is to learn about it before seeking out objectives. Claude seems to prioritize specific objectives over general exploration, to its detriment. Wonder why that is?

You are literally erasing my existence, mods???

My culture is NOT your costume, fake-normie.

By "think spacially/temporally," do you mean "produce valid outputs for spacial/temporal problems"

Mostly the former, yeah, on further reflection. It can navigate specific problems when directly presented with them (i.e when that's all it needs to consider), but when spatial navigation is not prompted directly because it is presumed to be implicit in the task, like keeping track of positions during ...certain activities scenarios, or navigating a game map as part of playing said game here, the retardation quickly becomes obvious.

The only way it could be is if the AI's ability to recognize the problem is hamstringed by its need to encode the state as a totally different sort of resource (linguistic tokens)

Actually yeah I believe this is exactly the problem, my experience with purely chat-based MUD-adjacent scenarios has shown that it can barely keep track of even that. Some kind of consistent external state of the world, or at least of the self, seems sorely missing, and the 'knowledge base' doesn't seem to successfully emulate that.

Claude seems to prioritize specific objectives over general exploration, to its detriment. Wonder why that is?

I'd guess it was given an explicit task - beat the game, which requires completing the objectives, which constrains its focus to the general idea of the game's progression it has from training (see its obsession with Route 5 during the tard yard arc). Exploration is basically you the player exercising agency in ways permitted by the game structure, agency of which Claude has none. Actually I wonder if explicitly prompting something like "beneficial items found in out of the way areas can help in beating trainers by making your mons stronger" would make it get lost even more actually explore.

but when spatial navigation is not prompted directly because it is presumed to be implicit in the task

Is this an artifact of the LLM having no side-effects while processing outside of the explicit textual output? e.g. if you tell them to process it explicitly but include that in a sidebar like the <thinking> block, would they have an easier time keeping the anime chicks where they oughta be? Human communication assumes that there's subtext in every conversation, and the deepest part of the subtext is that the other party is thinking and remembering certain things. But there's no equivalent for an LLM.

Actually yeah I believe this is exactly the problem, my experience with purely chat-based MUD-adjacent scenarios has shown that it can barely keep track of even that. Some kind of consistent external state of the world, or at least of the self, seems sorely missing, and the 'knowledge base' doesn't seem to successfully emulate that.

Memory, in other words. And all the hairiness that entails. I wonder why the knowledge base approach seems to have fallen flat. It's a very plausible idea on the surface! If there's too much for me to keep track of, or I'm worried I'll forget the details, the correct solution is to write it down and refer to the notes.

Actually, re-reading the design, it looks like the knowledge base isn't so much like a binder of notes as it is a single post-it note stuck to the screen - Claude doesn't query it deliberately, it apparently gets the entire contents of it shoved into the prompt. Wild! That would explain part of why it's so useless. It's hard to fit anything very detailed in there and means that Claude can't get a new set of "notes" for whatever area/task it's currently attempting to handle.

I'd guess it was given an explicit task - beat the game, which requires completing the objectives, which constrains its focus to the general idea of the game's progression it has from training (see its obsession with Route 5 during the tard yard arc). Exploration is basically you the player exercising agency in ways permitted by the game structure, agency of which Claude has none. Actually I wonder if explicitly prompting something like "beneficial items found in out of the way areas can help in beating trainers by making your mons stronger" would make it get lost even more actually explore.

Yeah, on a strict level Claude can't possibly be agentic, but it could definitely be given a richer set of goals. What if you gave it something open-ended like "Pokemon is a game that children play to explore, befriend Pokemon, and win tough battles. Play this game the way it was meant to be played"? Or, if it needs more hand-holding, "explore the world of Pokemon and defeat the Elite Four"? Although this would only be helpful if it learned from exploring. Otherwise it would find every corner of MOMS_HOUSE as magical as the first time it explored it.

OTOH it's interesting how it doesn't seem to take a step back here and define a meta-strategy, an approach that makes pursuing future goals easier. That comes naturally to humans as a function of learning. Whenever you try doing something new, you play around with it a little first rather than directly attempt to achieve a goal, right? I suspect one reason that this AI doesn't do it is that it's not trained to learn, as it is incapable of learning.

Is this an artifact of the LLM having no side-effects while processing outside of the explicit textual output?

Pretty much, which is also why dumb hacks like letting the LLM explicitly write out its chain of thought before the actual response have been so effective.

if you tell them to process it explicitly but include that in a sidebar like the block, would they have an easier time keeping the anime chicks where they oughta be?

Yes, actually. Instructing the LLM to insert basic statboxes/infoblocks after every response (and regexing them out via the frontend after to avoid shitting up the context) so it has the basic "states" at the tip of its proverbial tongue at all times has been the meta for a pretty long time now. Something like this:

End your response with "infoblock" to keep track of the scene. You don’t have to mention those details in your actual response unless they are important. Use the format below:

<infoblock>

Location: (Current location)
Positions: (All the characters' and {{user}}'s current positions relative to each other.)
Outfits: (For each character their current clothing and underwear.)

</infoblock>

I can't say exactly how well it works, but accounts of e.g. sizefags people who require accurate dimensions and/or relative positions for their scenarios say it's definitely better than placebo.

I wonder why the knowledge base approach seems to have fallen flat.

IMO exactly because of this:

re-reading the design, it looks like the knowledge base isn't so much like a binder of notes as it is a single post-it note stuck to the screen - Claude doesn't query it deliberately, it apparently gets the entire contents of it shoved into the prompt.

So it's basically just another part of the prompt without(?) any distinguishing features, and Claude's attention growing more scattered as the context limit grows is a known problem. In my experience amnesia/retardation kicks in as soon as 20k tokens. Granted, I don't know how their prompt builder looks like, or what context limit they use - although I suspect money isn't as much of a problem for an Anthropic researcher as it is for someone like me, so I expect it to be pretty high given the 200k upper bound.

It's hard to fit anything very detailed in there and means that Claude can't get a new set of "notes" for whatever area/task it's currently attempting to handle.

Yeah, I hope nobody tells them about worldinfo or something. I'm still convinced the median /g/oon still has the median researcher's ass handily beat wrt "prompt engineering". Arguably this is a testament to how powerful a tool SillyTavern is, but afaik every feature has been initially conceived and pitched by the community anyway.

What if you gave it something open-ended like "Pokemon is a game that children play to explore, befriend Pokemon, and win tough battles. Play this game the way it was meant to be played"?

I expect that wouldn't change much, arguably it'd make it get lost even more, at least now it seems to have a fairly clear objective in mind (beat children defeat gyms), which it can even translate into lower-level "tasks" like navigating routes.

Besides, the minimal prompting seems to be the point; from my understanding the dev is unwilling to hold Claude's hand any more than necessary and he wishes to see how it holds up on its own, even if it takes it days to get out of every stupid loop he gets stuck in. I wish I had unlimited credit think it's dumb, even with crutches to streamline progression and break loops this would still be pretty interesting to watch, but oh well.

edit: I tuned back into the stream and immediately witnessed a page-long reply thread starting with someone asserting Claude's preferred pronouns and gender, based on them literally just asking it. I thus retract my observation about this being the sanest Twitch chat. At least there's content now.

Outfits: (For each character their current clothing and underwear.)

and underwear

This site needs emojis for shit like this. Text doesn't do it justice.

Hobbyists have no shame.

Yeah, I hope nobody tells them about worldinfo or something. I'm still convinced the median /g/oon still has the median researcher's ass handily beat wrt "prompt engineering". Arguably this is a testament to how powerful a tool SillyTavern is, but afaik every feature has been initially conceived and pitched by the community anyway.

It looks like they actually implemented something similar to what I was talking about earlier - I watched Claude sit and churn for a while after it left Pewter, moving all information about that city into long-term memory (with explicit tags!) and clearing up local information. It's now back in Mt Moon, so we'll see whether this has made it more effective at navigation. What it's definitely doing is taking meaningful and extended "clock cycles" to manage - so this kind of improvement is definitely not free or cheap at present implementation/with present models.

Very cool tool from WorldInfo. I like the idea of bringing word definitions into context transparently based on the prompt.

I expect that wouldn't change much, arguably it'd make it get lost even more, at least now it seems to have a fairly clear objective in mind (beat children defeat gyms), which it can even translate into lower-level "tasks" like navigating routes.

Besides, the minimal prompting seems to be the point; from my understanding the dev is unwilling to hold Claude's hand any more than necessary and he wishes to see how it holds up on its own, even if it takes it days to get out of every stupid loop he gets stuck in. I wish I had unlimited credit think it's dumb, even with crutches to streamline progression and break loops this would still be pretty interesting to watch, but oh well.

Yeah, watching the money burn is a little eye-watering, but I appreciate how seriously the guy seems to take it. He seems to have known from the start that it wasn't going to be a magical success, but wants to see what it takes to get it working. I'm here for that. My only complaints are: there's no summary of where it's been/what it's done (so I can't track progress easily) and there's no export of the knowledge base over time to show what it's learned. Getting to read the knowledge base would be incredibly interesting.

Hobbyists have no shame.

How very lewd, to have the characters have underwear instead of starting naked like every self-respecting anatomy study.

Hobbyists have no shame.

I've seen things... *cough* you people wouldn't believe...

I watched Claude sit and churn for a while after it left Pewter, moving all information about that city into long-term memory (with explicit tags!) and clearing up local information. It's now back in Mt Moon, so we'll see whether this has made it more effective at navigation.

It seems to still firmly remain in Mt Moon, sadly, but all the <thinking> about a certain "loop prevention log" seems hopeful, if anything it at least seems to retain said log in context and refer to it quite often. Will check back in the morning, I'm getting invested.

watching the money burn is a little eye-watering

This is putting it mildly tbh, this guy is quite literally living my best life, even just worldinfo on its own has gotten me a lot of fun exercises in tard wrangling. I would kill a man in cold blood to sit and fuck (around) with chatbots all day as, or at least in parallel to, my day job without constantly fretting over my OR credits. Not that goons haven't burned even more money in aggregate at this point (most of which isn't theirs either), but... fuck, man. It should've been me! Not him! How do AI safetyists get to take away my toys and keep the cool toys to themselves?!

there's no summary of where it's been/what it's done (so I can't track progress easily) and there's no export of the knowledge base over time to show what it's learned.

Agreed, would've been interesting to see. I don't know if he's sitting on the "tech" as it were and doesn't want to reveal too much but I can fairly confidently say he doesn't really have anything special yet, the setup definitely doesn't seem Neuro-sama-tier complicated.

I've seen things... cough you people wouldn't believe...

LOL

fun exercises in tard wrangling

Is that a full TTRPG campaign set up for an LLM to execute on? How well does that work, and how extensive can it get? Is there some kind of external scaffolding for selecting things like random events, or does it have the capacity to toss all the events together in memory and then select? How long does it go before it totally loses the plot? (Maybe not an appropriate Culture War Roundup topic, but w/e.)

I considered playing around with some of that stuff a while back but I just couldn't justify the costs to myself. It's interesting, but so are a lot of other things that are WAY cheaper (and I'm at this point morally opposed to interfacing with large companies if I can at all help it). If cost-to-performance comes massively down over the next decade, maybe I'll try a local model off a reasonably priced GPU. Otherwise, idk, it's cool hearing stories.

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Happy tariffs eve, to those who celebrate.

With by all accounts the tariffs against Mexico and Canada going into action tomorrow, actually for real maybe probably this time, let's have a slice of cake and blow some party horns. This is quite a significant change of political fortunes - symbolically at least, and one would presume economically too, depending on how quickly the reshufflings happen or if this actually goes through at all. Since the 1880s, and more definitely since the 1980s, the world and its various regional economic blocs have moved towards the free trade of goods and services between nations. It has not been uniform or without reverses, but the trend has been unmistakable.

Often I like to wonder how a given event might be thought of 100 or 1000 years from now - will some future textbook see this as the high water mark of globalism, some point in the line of history that is forever after viewed with special significance? As much as people have claimed Donald Trump has been hindered by the Deep State, they seem to be slow to react to him ripping up one of the signature features of American hegemony (something he himself has contributed to, given that it's his free trade deal that is essentially being dissolved).

At the very least this is all going to be fascinating - one of the ironclad, universally agreed-upon tenets of a social science being put to the test. Markets have not reacted well so far, but that's as much a feature of groupthink as it is reflective of material reality. It's a good time to be a prospective PhD in Economics. You're about to have more than you could have ever hoped to work with.

So, have a Happy New Era. If this is actually happening, which I'm sure a lot of people are still unsure about (certainly I am). See you on the other side.

What odds do you place on this causing local depressions or a global recession?

I’d go for at least single digit.

For the life of me I don't understand why the Fed started cutting way before it was clear they got the job done.

The worse sin was the Fed not raising in 2021. But, sadly, I think the Fed is in the bag for one party.

I don't think it's so much that (The Fed did keep rates low in Trump's first term, after all.) as a bias toward "low rates good", belief that inflation was "transitory" and would correct itself more quickly than it did (Strictly speaking, it was, in the sense that inflation in the late 40s was also transitory.), and fear that raising rates would slow down the economy more than it did (Volker's rate hikes made for a nasty recession in the early 80s.). There's also the inconvenient problem that high rates are bad for the government's balance sheet.

(The Fed did keep rates low in Trump's first term, after all.)

Trump actually bullied Powell into that, IIRC.

The fed's already changed US Q1 growth forecasts from 2% to -3%: https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow

Trump's core appeal was an improved economy, particularly comparisons between the 2016-2020 economy and the 2021-2024 economy. Not that he has to run for re-election, but if he tanks the economy chasing tariffs, he might end up disgraced even among those who voted for him.

Negative partisans will still hate him less than Democrats, and his core will still love him, but he has a chance at destroying the future of his movement. It was already looking shaky whether MAGA could outlive Trump.

The US could easily crush Canada or Mexico in a trade war. It would do fine against the EU or China. It’s suicide to attempt all at once! The bargaining position of the US isn’t going to be better after a year of tariffs with neighbors that hate us and -10% gdp growth.

Fucking up the economy has got to be the one way to get congress to step up.

Fucking up the economy has got to be the one way to get congress to step up.

Congressional Republicans are sufficiently cowed or sycophantic that unless their base turns on Trump they're unlikely to yank his chain. And Trump has repeatedly proven that he can dictate reality to the base.

No. They did not update their forecasts by 5% because of today's news, and this is not an official forecast.

It isn't a forecast at all - it is a nowcast. It is the Fed's best estimate of what is happening right now, but won't be officially reported until Q1 GDP comes out at the end of April (provisionally) and late June (as a final official number). The numbers are annualised quarterly numbers, so a 5 percentage point shift in growth means that (if the nowcast is correct) the economy is, right now, 1 1/4% smaller than predicted.

DOGE has fired about 35,000 people so far who won't have new jobs yet. In addition, about 75,000 workers are on the payroll but not working because they took the 8-month buyout, and 10,000 are locked out at USAID. That means 120,000 former government employees are no longer contributing to GDP. There are 133 million full-time workers in the US, so ~0.1 percentage points of the 1.2 point drop is due to government cuts.

With understanding he is quite o'errun;
And by too great accomplishments undone:
With skill he vibrates his eternal tongue,
For ever most divinely in the wrong.

Speaking as a Canadian, we are so, so boned. Things were already looking bad for us economically, with poor productivity, insane housing bubble, and crumbling infrastructure while debt keeps piling up. I keep hearing from my fellow citizens that we are going to need to diversify our trading partners and I really can’t believe they can be so insane. Like, you thinks it’s gonna be easy to freight our goods across the second largest country in the world, to get it across an ocean? And the buyer won’t even have dollars to trade us for it?

So boned

Looks like trade with the US is ~20% of Canadas GDP. Imports are also sizeable. This will not end well for Canada - my sincere apologies from the US. I honestly wonder what Trump is after.

I honestly wonder what Trump is after.

Obligatory "anschluss", but Southern Ontario is still more industrialized than the US North East is with a government more sympathetic to natural resource development than the Blue states that it supplies with energy.

Looks like trade with the US is ~20% of Canadas GDP.

And it'll effectively be a 50% tariff if the Canadian government decides to "retaliate" (less cutting off its nose to spite the face, and more cutting off its head to spite the rest of its body): 25% on the way down for the raw resources, and 25% on finished goods on the way back.

This will not end well for Canada

The Federal government has already abdicated. This country is post-national- the Provinces are conducting the foreign policy now.

And it'll effectively be a 50% tariff if the Canadian government decides to "retaliate" (less cutting off its nose to spite the face, and more cutting off its head to spite the rest of its body): 25% on the way down for the raw resources, and 25% on finished goods on the way back.

Why stop at two tariff payments on the same materials? Raw aluminum goes to the States ( about $15B), then aluminum products come back to Canada ($4B), I'm sure some of that gets put into manufactured goods for the States, and...

I heard that it's much worse for the automobile industry, with semi-finished parts hopping back and forth several times.

EDIT: Seven times (including one from Mexico), to be precise.

It's all so petty. Trump wants Trudeau to bend the knee. Trudeau sees #resist as a strategy to improve his own popularity, and if average Canadians get fucked all the better. That's been his MO from day one.

In the end, we have two vain leaders peacocking for their respective audiences.

Increasingly, personal vanity seems to be the explanation that makes the most sense for most of what Trump is doing. After decades of the left talking about the "American Empire," Trump is embracing that view and demanding fealty from his vassals.

Fealty would make more sense. It seems that a lot of this is driven by basically projecting domestic cultural battles and petty resentments and weird fixations out into international politics.

Trudeau already negotiated a deal with Trump last time around.

And then Trump shows back up treating Trudeau as a domestic partisan enemy because ??

Like, I don't think this is a "both sides" thing: Trudeau/the Liberals would probably love to head this off again but nobody is sure what's going on with Trump (who chose to be obnoxious even by Trump standards) which cause a backlash within the population any leader would have to be wary about meeting head on.

Like, the perception of hesitation alone has caused the only blip in what should otherwise have been a cakewalk for the CPC into power.

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.

That may be his thought process, but it's retarded.

Trudeau is who he is because that's (apparently) what plays for Canadians. His domestic policy is as a theater kid lib with delusions of "punching above our weight" in international relations. When it comes to actual relations with America he plays ball with Trump or Biden because everyone understands the reality that Canada is the junior party.

There was no Zelenskyy/Hunter Biden issue. Trudeau just is a lib why would he agree with Trump politically? It's one thing to say one should not personally wrong Trump (already crazy, given his nature) but another to say no one can differ on policy. And if being a lib is an issue what of Starmer?

This isn't some Vance dressing down via speech.

It's retarded to even care about Canadian domestic politics in the first place given that it's irrelevant to its fundamentally subordinate position to the US. It may be annoying for Trumpists to see pretty theater kid Trudeau on the Daily Show being fellated by whoever has that now (even that more or less stopped as his popularity dropped) or to see libs whine about going to Canada but none of that matters. Nobody actually goes to Canada because America is richer and better, and when the US says "jump" (like "arrest a Huawei exec and hurt relations with China") Canada jumps.

But, if you do care, it's retarded because Trudeau was already a dead man walking. The only thing standing in the way of the CPC sweeping him and his party into the dustbin is Trump himself.

There's nothing "easy" about dealing with this sort of retardation.

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 this is actually his thinking...yikes.

"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?

I'm not even sure what youre referring to tbh. Maybe I'm just totally desensitized (it's been a decsde since "it's current_year"). But it is indeed retarded to take Trudeau being Trudeau (in a way that imposes no costs unlike the Ukraine war) into an economic war when he'll bend on actual policy. Send Vance to give a speech.

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.

I legitimately suspect someone from the Zeihan school of thought convinced him that he could exploit the weaknesses in the confederation to maybe cause Alberta to secede and end Canada.

It explains/fits with a few things. The lack of clear criteria to end the tariffs, his inability to shut the fuck up about the 51st state thing (like a kid whose just heard of a cool new idea and can't wait to share it with everyone) and his general desire to expand territory.

If he could meaningfully change the borders of the US he is going down in history.

I've been reading Richard Gwyn's two-part biography of Sir John A recently and it's interesting to see how many direct parallels there are. Confederation was essentially premised on economic rationales in order for the British North American colonies to be able to compete against American tariffs, and much of the post-Confederation work of Macdonald was to try and cobble together a semblance of national identity and acquire the rest of British North America as a way to forestall American annexation. We've been in tough times before. The problem is I don't know if there's any politician of that caliber around today. The people who would be that kind of leader generally aren't in politics to begin with.

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?

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?

You already know the answer to that question.

You also already know the election's going to come down to being a referendum on who wants to prosecute the war; that is, in part, why the Reform party (in blue) doesn't have much room to campaign while the Conservative party (in red) is going full bore on the war- the Red party will attempt to get voted in before their idiotic policies really start taking their toll, because by then it'll be too late to do anything.

the current sabre rattling (pocket-knife rattling?) is exclusively to play to domestic morons for a sugar rush in the polls.

The tariffs are a liability for the Red party (no matter what they do, they lose), but abandoning the last 6 months of agitating for non-confidence votes only to suddenly slam on the brakes for political expedience is a huge liability for the Blue party. 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 (and the pattern of constantly doing that only to not do that now is itself a liability).

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.

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.

Canada has no culture...except when Americans say it. Nationalism is finally a thing again and it must get its due.

Nah, it's inorganic, and probably astroturfed to a large degree. People will settle down soon enough.

On the plus side container export to China is incredibly cheap. Shanghai to LA is like $4000, the reverse is $700. If you guys have the port capacity, there's a huge market out west in the far east.

Not sure about bulk rates tbh, and a lot of Canadian exports are bulk iirc.

Shanghai to LA is like $4000, the reverse is $700. If you guys have the port capacity, there's a huge market out west in the far east.

It's cheap because there's no market there.

There is for raw materials, which is what Canada exports.

That's a different shipping contract than the on @SteveAgain and @The_Nybbler are talking about. They don't put bulk goods into container ships.

I've actually always wondered if you could pour a bunch of coal into a shipping container to make use of the basically free return trip. Bulk shipping rates are even lower though. Can't beat $30/ton all the way to China. Damn.

So boned

Canada is so easily fixable.

Step 1) Elect non-retarded government

Step 2) Immigration moratorium. Evict the temporary residents who gamed the student visa system.

Step 3) Deregulate economy

Step 4) Let capitalism do the rest.

Canada's advantages are numerous. High IQ population. Low population density. Immense natural resources. All Canadians have to do is get out of their own way, and the future is going to be great.

Unironically, the biggest threat to Canada is Trump. Not because of anything he will do. But because of the allergic reaction he provokes that causes Canadians to self-own and double down on socialism and open borders. Sadly, this is the final boss that most Canadians can never defeat.

As a Canadian, the first step is impossible. We're under the permanent rule of theater-kid occupied government: all optics, no substance.

Damn. I just checked the polls and Trump is killing Poilievre's chances. I'm sorry for the collateral damage.

Any chance to move to the US? It's nice here.

Unironically, the biggest threat to Canada is Trump.

It’s worse than that. Our biggest threat is America. Trump is the epitome of Americans to Canadians. But you’re otherwise entirely correct. We self own all the time just to pretend we are better than America when in reality we are worse and getting worse all the time

At the very least this is all going to be fascinating - one of the ironclad, universally agreed-upon tenets of a social science being put to the test. Markets have not reacted well so far, but that's as much a feature of groupthink as it is reflective of material reality. It's a good time to be a prospective PhD in Economics. You're about to have more than you could have ever hoped to work with.

This is like firing up the Large Hadron Collider for the first time for macro-economists right?

Markets have not reacted well so far

Do they have any reason to? Honest question.

I assume you mean "do they have any reason to [react negatively]", to which the answer is very much yes. The North American economy is very integrated by nature of its geography; Pennsylvania is a lot closer to Ontario than it is to Oregon, Nova Scotia is much more enmeshed with Maine than British Columbia. When American and Canadian firms search for raw materials or markets or services they have previously looked regionally because the regulatory and economic circumstances allowed them to essentially ignore borders. This is going to play out in a million different ways; every Canadian and American firm sources goods, materials, or services from some other company on the other side of the border, and now the economic rationale for that has changed dramatically - with an accompanying uncertainty whether it will ever change back.

Mexico's relationship to Canada and the US is different in that the flows of individual goods and services tend to be unidirectional rather than hopelessly entangled. But Mexican trade with the US and Canada isn't just peppers and tomatoes. There's a lot of industry in Mexico (the #1 export of Mexico to both the US and Canada are cars; their biggest import from both is industrial components).

"do they have any reason to [react negatively]"

"do they have any reason to react well" was my intention, so the opposite, but the answer works either way. Thanks!

As an American, I'm glad that after four years of pointless struggle under Biden Trump has finally taken bold steps to normalize relations with inflation.

Seriously, these tariffs are an absolutely bizarre own-goal. Yet another reminder that the people with TDS were absolutely right all along.


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