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If being highly literate is the standard for knowing a language, then the vast majority of people in the world do not even know their native language. This is not to mention cases where someone's mother tongue lacks a literary tradition or even a writing system. It seems to me that in practice most people equate "speaking a language" with something like a B1 level on the CEFR, though your typical Anglophone would probably start saying they speak Spanish or French at an even lower level than that.

I do agree that most people underestimate how hard it is to get from that basic level to high literacy e.g. it would probably be easier for me to learn half a dozen (related) languages to B1 than to get to C2 in my heritage language despite the enormous head start of having literally spoken it at home my entire life. At the end of the day though, language is a tool, and what matters is if it serves its purpose i.e. if you can sing lullabies to your children in your mother tongue, haggle at the market in your local trade language, and read a book in the literary language of your imperial overlords, then you can have a fine life without bothering to "fully learn" any of them.

If you mean "criminals according to the arbitrary application of USSR laws", which included criminal punishment for things like criticizing The Party, having more property then the Party things you should have, or procuring any food when The Party decided you must starve to death, let alone being late to the job or making any mistake (which is clearly terrorist sabotage) - then yes. Otherwise I don't think they were.

Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?

I'd say more likely any person who would end up in this situation would be a criminal with the probability > 95%. I mean to set off the whole thing, the person obviously needs to be black, poor (a cop may arrest an affluent looking man, but much less likely to manhandle him), drug addict (otherwise he wouldn't die) and with poor impulse control (otherwise he'd just quietly go into the car). And it should happen in a large city, otherwise it'd be impossible to make a huge deal out of it. The chance that a person with such profile, statistically, doesn't have a record is not very large, to be honest.

And I am sure that- in your superiority and/or boredom- you will no longer waste your time responding to any of my posts that are not directly to you ever again.

In return, I will continue to strive to do the same for you.

Do you feel like these snarky comebacks add anything, impress or convince others?

Your example was actually a fair skit for showing the limits of a hyperagent mentality.

The short discussion, as much of a caricature as it starts as for Agent A, is rather more damning for Agent B, the supposed reasonable party and hyperagent proxy. By literally having a discussion that does not include an intermediary Agent C who perpetrated unspecified war crimes, whose existence is acknowledged but also dismissed by Agent B in favor of prosecuting Agent A on implicit rather than even explicit responsibility, it demonstrates the hyperagent theorist failure and inclination to unjustly allocation punishments and sanctions on the basis of convenience and accessibility, rather than agency is the nominal crimes.

There are interesting angles, historical examples, and differences/hypocrisies that could easily be pointed at. After all, at no point does Agent B ever actually assert that Agent A had any knowledge of, issued any direction for, had any operational control over, or ever voiced any support for. Agent B's accusation and prosecution of Agent A as the responsible party could run word-for-word even if Agent C actively deceived, defied, circumvented, and even defected from Agent A in order to commit the war crimes. Agent A is responsible merely for having supported Agent C at some point, not for having supported Agent C for the purpose of the atrocity alluded to. There is no criminal intent required, or even awareness.

The allocation of responsibility to Agent A by Agent B is fundamentally uninterested in the agency, moral responsibility, and moral culpability of Agent C. Agent B merely treats Agent A as the hyperagent on the basis of providing support, regardless of the degree of support (A is not claimed to be the decisive supporter), the exclusivity of support (A is not claimed to be the only supporter), or the restrictions that were attempted (A is not claimed to have taken not mitigations). Agent B, in doing so, begins to validate the nominally farcical accusation by Agent A that Agent B is naive, simplistic, and ignoring cause and effect.

If it was intentional, it was well done, with multiple levels. If it was not, that was my error, and I apologize for confusing you.

  • Tried Annihilation Score the second time after a break, but then caught myself thinking "why I am forcing myself to read a book which I clearly hate? I'm not even paid for this!" and dropped it. Probably done with Stross for a while.
  • Read Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, which, unsurprisingly, is an overview of how racial classifications work in the US. No partisan politics (well at least not noticeable to me, with all my biases), just a meticulous description of the whole thing. I thought it's a mess but boy was I underestimating it by orders of magnitude. Truly eye-opening, though not in any optimistic way.
  • Started Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and got about halfway so far. I wasn't sure I was going to like it, but so far it's going surprisingly well, even though I'm getting a bit of "show about nothing" vibe.

You’re trying to have it both ways. You claim that Antony Blinkin and the State Department do not speak for Ukraine, then you turn around and list all the ways that they have MASSIVE LEVERAGE over Ukraine. So which is it? Are the documented statements by official representatives of the American government that Ukraine will have elections when they have Crimea (read: when pigs fly and the sun rises in the west) a legitimate statement of policy of not? Why should I ignore the rantings of Ukraine’s very rich, very influential benefactor that could scotch their war effort on a whim?

I may or may not be an AI skeptic by your definition - I think it's quite likely that 2030 is a real year, and think it's plausible that even 2050 is a real year.

Absolutely not, at least by standards! You acknowledge the possibility that we might get AGI in the near-term, and I see no firm reason to over index on a given year. Most people I'd call "skeptics" deny the possibility of AGI at all, or rule out any significant chance of near-term AGI, or have modal timelines >30 years.

I agree that LLMs are missing something, but I'm agnostic on whether brute-force scaling will get us to undisputable AGI. It may or may not. Perhaps online learning, as you hint at, might suffice.

Still, LLMs have a tendency not to actually coin new terms, and to fail to use the newly coined terms fluently in the rare cases that they do coin such a term (which is probably why they don't do it - if coining a new term was effective for problem solving, it would have been chiseled into their cognition by the RLVR process).

I wonder if RLHF plays a role. I don't think human data annotators would be positively inclined towards models that made up novel words.

Thank you for taking the time to respond!

yes ... ha ha ha ... yes!

Ukraine is already too weak to attack Russia by choice, and that's not going to change no matter what the outcome of this is. I don't believe this is actually Russia's condition.

As far as I can see, the problem with this option is strictly that neither the current Ukrainian government (which surely would collapse in such a situation) nor the West (for whom a neutral Ukraine with present borders is of little value, and they would have to credibly signal that they would defend it, vs. the option to have it cheaply continue killing Russians and gamble on the absolute bonanza that a surprise Russian collapse would be) would actually want it.

I would contend that Russia would also not accept this proposition, but even without that contention you already make it sound like a nonstarter.

If another country were actually willing to face Russia, they could do so right now. At this point, I think that if almost anyone but the U.S. said that they were sending troops and kept those troops in Ukraine, Russia wouldn't actually use nukes.

Yeah that's why pretty much stopped playing - to have a good game takes at least a whole weekend, maybe longer, for pretty much every game I'd enjoy. And I can't justify spending that much time to myself. I played Disco Elysium though recently, and didn't regret it, but probably won't do anything like that again for a while.

Acquiescence+aftercare from the US was reportedly that the Americans told the Germans before the attack, as well as soon after.

I knew it:

My opinion is Biden could basically call Scholz and say "I hope none of your folks are working on these pipelines of yours, because we're blowing them up tomorrow".

@dr_analog, you got your wish!

That's good! You'd probably have a vision problem if you did. One typically does not see stunning rebukes of foreign, and former, political appointees who are providing rhetorical, financial, and military support to your own side.

If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.

What? No, that's not true. Granting the (very substantial) premise, the conclusion is obviously going to be "don't let these people run society", but that only requires disenfranchisement, not deportation (except in the edge case of a supermajority that can overthrow the disenfranchising government).

Do you feel like these snarky comebacks add anything, impress or convince others?

The galaxybrained 'you're just projecting your own ignorance and whenever you point out the silliness in what I'm saying - it's actually you that's wrong and each time you point this out it only shows how wrong you are' approach was fun but it's gotten a bit tired by now. You need a new routine.

Opposition parties remain banned, the press is still under government control, the Verkhovna Rada re-passes the martial law declaration every 90 days with the precision of a metronome. There are no plans for an election in the near future. I’m not seeing any stunning Ukrainian rebuke of what Antony Blinkin said.

Thank you for demonstrating a failure mode.

The whole Ukrainian govt is on US and EU payroll, about half their money comes from the West vs Ukrainian taxes.

"So I'm on trial for war crimes. Where is the justice? We are all individuals, making our own decisions. I never forced anyone to do anything. This prosecution is based on spooks, naïve conceptions of conspiracy and a simplistic understanding of a complex world of interrelated cause and effect."

"Well you did pay the soldier's wages. You provided them armaments, training and intelligence. You're responsible for their actions, your support is implicit."

Even assuming that this is true, could they really have done it without support or at least acquiescence+aftercare from the US?

Acquiescence+aftercare from the US was reportedly that the Americans told the Germans before the attack, as well as soon after.

As for being puzzled by regional parties whose security concerns Germany dismissed and ignorred in pursuing Nord Stream, I suspect you believe they have a far greater fear and/or positive opinion of Germany than they do. Germany's Nord Stream policy was not exactly considered a benign or neutral policy by its Baltic neighbors. German politicians had not only insisted it was ridiculous to oppose Nord Stream on grounds of Russian concerns, but also that it was ridiculous to believe Nord Stream interests might sabotage Germany's willingness to support its European neighbors security if Russia did do something stupid. Both of these concerns were validated by the German response to Putin.

If anything, rather than a snub the non-cooperation was both a retaliation and a warning. Germany could not defend Nord Stream when it was warned in advance. Germany could not pursue Nord Stream saboteurs without the cooperation of its neighbors in the present. And Germany would not be able to protect any future Nord Stream in the future, if it disregarded its neighbors security concerns. The Nord Stream concept was not a German-Russia bilateral concern. It was a concern of far more people, and far more veto authorities in practice.

Germany was never so adored and/or feared that it could expect other countries to defend Germany's privileged energy relationship with Russian at their own expense. If that surprised the Germans, well it wasn't for a lack of being warned.

The Taiwanese are Chinese. They may be die hard against Communist rule, but they have no history as a state that wasn't thoroughly Chinese. Unless maybe you count the Japanese occupation but I don't think so.

I wouldn't be so dismissive of the possibility that solutions exist which simultaneously make Ukraine too weak to make it attractive for it to resume the war at a later point and reclaim territories (what is really Russia's minimum condition) and too strong to make it attractive for Russia to do so and capture more. The most obvious option is for NATO to provide a binding, boots-on-ground guarantee to defend it should Russia attack again. As far as I can see, the problem with this option is strictly that neither the current Ukrainian government (which surely would collapse in such a situation) nor the West (for whom a neutral Ukraine with present borders is of little value, and they would have to credibly signal that they would defend it, vs. the option to have it cheaply continue killing Russians and gamble on the absolute bonanza that a surprise Russian collapse would be) would actually want it.

Without EU membership/emigration opportunities/gibs, even the Ukrainian people (who are largely happy to accept a chance of death for a chance of climbing the butter mountains and swimming the wine lakes) would see no reason to accept such a peace, though I thought Russia at one point softened its stance on accepting an Austria-like "EU but no NATO" arrangement.

I get ya, I just have a hobby of linguistic nitpicking.

their sole foray into Russian Territory

From a purely military perspective the invasion may have been the right move. They inflicted serious losses on the unprepared Russian defenders and diverted an impressive amount of manpower away from the main attack in Ukraine.

But from that perspective they should have cut their losses and run when the Russians brought their entire war machine to bear on the pocket. Trying to replicate attacks like the Kursk attack in other places along the Russian border would probably have been smart. But the fact of occupying Russian land was probably too much to just give up without a fight.

The population would mostly flee and be happily snapped up by European union which needs wagies. Baltic sea navigation wouldn't be improved, actually seizing the Baltic state could possibly make western Europe close the Danish straits.

If you read the latter part of his post, I think it's pretty clear he means we shouldn't mind the Baltics getting invaded, but of course correct me if I'm wrong.

I kinda hold a similar opinion. I don't really want to care about the Baltics. But they are in NATO, and we (the US) are allied to them, so we do have to mind the Baltics getting invaded. If there's a politically feasible way to extricate ourselves from having to protect the Baltics, like somehow removing them from NATO, then I would support it.

If it's just the position of the front, most available maps should be accurate enough. As biased as the reporting may be, they can't fake the front more than a few miles.

This social structure is extremely common in history and is dishonestly presented as proof of how people can be “multilingual”.

I do not see what's dishonest about such a claim. Being multilingual isn't the same as being equally or maximally fluent in all the languages of concern. Being able to be conversational at all is the bare minimum, and counts by itself.