The whole notion that voting is the only action one can take to participate politically is absurd. You can join a union, educate people around you, organize strikes, do mutual aid, and a myriad other things that don’t involve voting for a party that’s simply less heinous than the alternative.

That’s not a lot by LLM standards. :)

the 3B version should need fairly modest hardware

this might be of interest, it’s a model that generates svgs that work really great for stuff like icons https://github.com/OmniSVG/OmniSVG

I’ve found lots of great uses. I find LLMs are great for grammar and spellchecking, acting as a sounding board, doing translations, writing shell scripts, digging through unfamiliar code bases, figuring out configurations for tools, finding relevant stuff in large documents, and they can be helpful for coding in languages I’m not well versed in.

lol this BBC?

• https://unherd.com/2024/11/who-verifies-bbc-verify/
• https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202102/1215710.shtml
• https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202102/1215082.shtml

The whole conspiracy theory started with a claim of millions of Uyghurs being supposedly imprisoned story is based on two highly dubious “studies.”. However, this claim is completely absurd when you stop and think about it even for a minute. That figure 1 million is repeated again and again. Let’s just look at how much space would you actually need to intern one million people.

This is a photo of Rikers Island, New York City’s biggest prison. The actual size of a facility interning ten thousand people.

According to Wikipedia, “The average daily inmate population on the island is about 10,000, although it can hold a maximum of 15,000.” Let’s assume this is a Xinjiang detention camp, holding ten to fifteen thousand people. How many of these would it take to hold one million people?

Let’s do some math:

In reality, one million people would probably take more space; all the supposed detention camps we see are much less dense than Rikers.

For comparison, San Francisco is 47 square miles. Amsterdam is 64 square miles. You’d literally need detention camps that total the size of San Francisco or Amsterdam to intern one million Uyghurs. It’d be like looking at a map of California. There’s Los Angeles. There’s San Diego. And look, there’s San Francisco Concentration City with its one million Uyghurs.

Literally visible to the naked eye from space.

CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, but their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals. Based on this absurdly small sample of research subjects in an area whose total population is 20 million, CHRD “extrapolated estimates” that “at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education camps in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps.” Furthermore, it doesn’t even make sense from logistics perspective.

Practically all the stories we see about China trace back to Adrian Zenz is a far right fundamentalist nutcase and not a reliable source for any sort of information. The fact that he’s the primary source for practically every article in western media demonstrates precisely what I’m talking about when I say that coverage is divorced from reality.

Zenz is a born-again Christian who lectures at the European School of Culture and Theology. This anodyne-sounding campus is actually the German base of Columbia International University, a US-based evangelical Christian seminary which considers the “Bible to be the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and whose mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ.”

Zenz’s work on China is inspired by this biblical worldview, as he recently explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”.

Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.

Zenz outlined these views in a book he co-authored in 2012, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation. In the tome, Zenz discussed the return of Jesus Christ, the coming wrath of God, and the rise of the Antichrist.

The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it’s clear that the methodology of his “research” doesn’t pass any kind of muster when examined closely.

It’s also worth noting that there is a political angle around the narrative around Xinjiang. For example, here’s George Bush’s chief of staff openly saying that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED admitting to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here’s an excerpt:

US has been stoking terrorism in the region while they’ve been running a propaganda campaign against China in the west. In fact, US even classified Uyghur separatists as a terrorist group at one point https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-was-at-war-uyghur-terrorists-now-claims-etim-doesnt-exist/276916/

Here’s an interview with a son of imam killed in Xinjiang https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-19/Son-of-imam-assassinated-in-Kashgar-s-2014-mosque-attack-speaks-out-RqNiyrcRuo/index.html

Here’s an account from a Pakistani journalist who has been all over Xinjiang (which borders Pakistan) claims that western media reports on “atrocities” are lies. https://dailytimes.com.pk/723317/exposing-the-occidents-baseless-lies-about-xinjiang/

It’s also worth noting that the accusations originate entirely from the west while Muslim majority countries support China, and their leaders have visited Xinjiang many times.

• https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/on-eid-xinjiang-imams-defend-china-against-u-s-criticism-1.5425967
• https://www.bolnews.com/latest/2023/07/pak-religious-leaders-nurture-bonds-of-cooperation-with-xinjiang/
• https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/islamic-envoys-say-china-is-protecting-minorities-in-xinjiang-after-five-day-visit

Also notable that whenever western media actually deigns to visit Xinjiang, which is not often, they’re unable to produce support for any of their claims of mass imprisonment and oppression, so they opt for insinuations instead https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9

There’s a further list of debunking here if you’re interested https://redsails.org/the-xinjiang-atrocity-propaganda-blitz/

The whole thing is very clearly a propaganda blitz that US is cynically using to manipulate impressionable people in the west.

Not necessarily just an LLM on its own. The key part is that the internal model is coupled with reinforcement learning where it becomes rooted in the behaviors of the physical world. Real time continuous learning is the way to get there, but it can be done using different approaches. For example, neurosymbolic AI combines deep neural networks with symbolic logic. The LLM is used to parse and classify noisy input data, while a logic engine is used to make decisions about it. My expectation is that we’ll see more of these types of approaches where different machine learning techniques are combined together going forward. LLMs will just be one part of the bigger whole.

I think LLMs could provide a human friendly interface for robots. There’s a lot of interesting work happening with embodied AI now, and in my opinion embodiment is the key ingredient for making AI intelligent in a human sense. A robot has to interact with the environment and it builds an internal model of the world for making decisions. This creates a feedback loop where the robot can learn the rules of the world and do meaningful interaction, and that’s precisely what’s missing with LLMs.

I think we might actually get Star Wars style droids in our lifetimes.

It’s hands down one of the best games I’ve played. The story was incredible, the world building was top notch, the characters were really well written, and the narrator was brilliant.

I didn’t do anything special with my character build, and ran through the game just fine. Maybe you just got supremely unlucky, but doesn’t seem to be representative of the experience most people have had. 🤷

Definitely wasn’t my experience. The way you solve puzzles largely depends on how you set up your character, and each problem had different ways you could approach it. There’s also no single ‘correct’ path through the game. Failure is just part of the story. Kind of weird to complain that a role playing game has RPG mechanics in it if you ask me.

In general, their articles will try to present actual facts that are verifiable, however they will often put spin on the reporting that can create a very skewed impression of the situation. The war in Ukraine is a good example, because if you only followed Reuters reporting then you would’ve had the impression that Ukraine had a good chance of winning the conflict. For the most part, they crafted this narrative without any outright lying. Instead they used tactics like selective reporting, skewing importance of the events to make certain ones seem more important while downplaying importance of others. For example, coverage of western weapons deliveries was hyped up along with Ukrainian strikes into Russian territory. Meanwhile, Russian captures of strategic cities like Bakhmut was dismissed as not having much relevance. Furthermore, Reuters, covers the conflict as if it was about capturing territory as opposed to attritional warfare making the reader think that it’s in a some sort of a stalemate just because front lines aren’t shifting dramatically.

Cats move with silent, elegant grace and watchful glowing eyes.

A great dive into the mechanics of it here. Basically, western economies became financialized and investors would rather invest in low risk ventures like software startups rather than factories and industry. On the other hand, In China, the state sector drives industrial development instead of markets. This created a dynamic where western companies would leverage subsidized industry in China and offload the costs for manufacturing while focusing on developing digital and service economies in the west.

I can recommend checking out sourcehut https://git.sr.ht/

I also started using Radicle lately, I think it’s a really interesting idea combining ideas from git and bittorrent to create a fully peer-to-peer code collaboration platform https://radicle.xyz/

Karate is far better if teaching actual self defense is part of the goal. Tae Kwon Do is very questionable in terms of application outside the sport context. Of course, caveat is that, as with anything, it also very much depends on the skill of the instructor.

lmfao hooman rights is when you do genocide and jail people protesting it