hotspur

There was a domain name issue and Hexbear went down for a day or two. Possibly other instances need to refresh (not sure if new domain is the same as before)

American culture, partly because of bullshit mythos and partly because of religious like devotion to oligarchic capitalism, selects for low-empathy sociopaths and individual atomization/isolation. My favorite low end example is to observe my fellow citizens driving when I go to the suburbs: you are in their personal story, and you are in their way. City living doesn’t fix all that, but having to live in close proximity to neighbors and get used to compromise helps push a slightly more communal vibe.

But basically the entire culture is built around a get-yours-first mentality? And more recently an influencer-inflected sort of hyper-real understanding of one’s value and potential. We’re like a national exemplar for the dunning-Kruger effect, or like kids who cheat at online video games swaggering around proud of their “achievements”.

Seems like we’re in the finding out phase after fucking around though.

Yeah I very much appreciate that addition, thanks OP!

Yeah ok, I do basically agree with you. It’s not an accurate equivalency, yet. We’re trending bad though. I’d say the example of Stephen Miller sort of accidentally hinting that they shut down USAID because they all donated to the Harris campaign had some chilling implications for example. He could just be assuming that, since that’s a safe assumption for populous urban areas generally, but they could also have cross checked lists of employees against political contributions.

I’m gonna take a second stab at replying, because you seem to be arguing in good faith.

My original point is that online chatbots have arbitrary curbs that are built in. I can run GPT 2.5 on my self host machine, and if I knew how to do it (I don’t) I could probably get it to have no curbs via retraining and clever prompting. The same is true of the deepseek models.

I don’t personally agree that there’s a huge difference between one model being curbed from discussing xi and another from discussing what the current politics du jour in the western sphere are. When you see platforms like meta censoring LGTBTQ topics but amplifying hate speech, or official congressional definitions of antisemitism including objection to active and on-going genocide, the idea of what government censorship is and isn’t becomes confusing.

Having personally received the bizarre internal agency emails circulating this week encouraging me to snitch out my colleagues to help root out the evils of DEIA thought in US gov’t the last week has only crystallized it for me. I’m not sure I care that much about Chinese censorship or authoritarianism; I’ve got budget authoritarianism at home, and I don’t even get high-speed rail out of the bargain. At least they don’t depend on forever wars and all of the attendant death and destruction that come with them to prop up their ponzi-scheme economies. Will they in the future, probably? They are basically just a heavily centralized/regulated capitalist enterprise now, so who knows. But right now? Do they engage in propaganda? Cyber-espionage? Yes and Yes. So do we, so do you, so does everyone who has a seat at the geopolitical table and the economy to afford it.

The point of all of this isn’t US GOOD CHINA BAD or US BAD CHINA GOOD. The article is about the deepseek models tearing out the floor of US dominance in AI. Personally, having deployed it and played with it, yeah. None of these products are truly useful to me yet, and I remain skeptical of their eventual value, but right now, party censorship or not, you can download a version of an LLM that you can run, retrain and bias however you want, and it costs you the bandwidth it took to download. And it performs on par with US commercial offerings that require pricey subscriptions. Offerings that apparently require huge public investment to keep afloat.

Wow what even is beehaw, I had no idea. At least China is honest about what they’re doing. The amount of bad faith in these replies is insane.

If you’re a shill, fine, good job. But if you’re not, have you paid any attention to the real world around you? We spent the last year enabling genocide, and the best fruits of our over-hyped tech and intellectual innovation factories are being revealed as the bullshit that most people always understood them to be.

The fact that you can accuse me of being dishonest, while providing no basis or evidence, while multiple federal agencies are under a strict gag order from any communication or purchasing with outside contacts… I mean really?

Like are you guys just another CIA adjacent cutout that believes in identity politics and SSRIs but has zero ability to critically assess the actual world around them?

You say Chinese state censorship is an understood quantity. Could be. But I’d say that my points about equivalencies are to illustrate that what we think is true, is often much more grey. I’ve been to China, and while I was impressed and shocked at how much more advanced it was than I expected, I also couldn’t imaging living there. It doesn’t change the fact that a stagnant late-stage capital mafia state that lives off defense contracting is performing ooorly against a centrally controlled capitalist state that has set different priorities (that’s right boy, deepseek-r1 is a side project of a…. CHINESE HEDGE FUND). It’s value neutral. But if you dismiss reality based on a conception of political censorship that I doubt you’ve deeply engaged with, enjoy.

The so called free market certainly didn’t seem to take much reassurance in deepseek being compromised by communist censorship this morning though. Probably because the deepseek news isn’t exceptional because of China, or what it is, but because of what it isn’t, compared to the bloated tech carcasses that the US has pinned its hopes on.

If you’re going to accuse China of state censorship, then I suppose you are also vehemently opposed to the censorship we apply to our media, social media and “AI” platforms, and since you dislike the lack of journalistic integrity in this article for pointing out that state censorship you would support similar caveats being added to articles about OpenAI, Meta, X in regards to how they handle issues like Gaza, Culture War topics and coverage of political candidates?

It’s fair to bring up comparisons when your critique is claiming an imbalance in portrayal between the “realities” of ai development in China and the US.

There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”. I’ve had chatGPT clam up in bizarre ways after it misinterprets what I’m asking. It just depends on company owning the product and what they view their legal exposure to be.

Also, we are applying huge govt subsidies to ai industry based on thin value evidence at this very moment. And we provide subsidies for many of our industries to help prop them up, sometimes to hugely bad effect. It’s what countries do to build, maintain and win industrial arms races.

Deepseek-R1 is open source and you can download it and run it offline. I’m not a power user but was able to get a functioning offline version of the 32B distill model running on a spare machine I had in a hour or so from scratch. I used online deepseek for most of the process to provide instructions and troubleshoot. I can’t comment on how amazing it is, other than to say so far it’s felt about as good as my interactions with GPT4 on the free chatGPT tier. In both cases I remain skeptical about their deep business use outside of certain areas.

From what I’ve read, you can use the base, and methodology and train your own new model if you have the technical ability and desire (rumor is meta AI has shelved their WIP and adopted deepseek as their new basis). This would imply that if you wanted to be able to talk to your LLM about topics like Taiwan, you could absolutely set up a model that would do that.

Yeah I basically agree with your point about the unpleasant logic behind such a move, and would only add that Greenland looks appealing if you’re trying to lock down the arctic from both sides of the continent—US has good arctic frontage on Alaska, and Greenland would bookend Canada and allow US more flexibility in countering Russia and expanding oil extraction.

I was trying to think about where this suddenly came from, and the first thing that kept popping up was Trumps current obsession with drill baby drill, the arctic is the last frontier for potentially easy extraction once all the ice melts and Canada, US and Russia have already been playing footsie there for a decade under the guise of science and commercial traffic trying to lay claim to stuff that was ignorable before.

Like some dude got in his ear and convinced him the future is in the arctic. It also adds some further explanation to Trump “joking” about making Canada a state. If it was just economic hardball / a new trade deal, they could leave it at tariffs and the like, but they keep saying they want to make it a state…

All of that makes me sick to my stomach, but as you say there is logic to it.

Yeah I’ve enjoyed this guys commentary in the past. Also he’s so… calm and soothing in how he speaks, which is always a nice find in a content creator.

I’m also noticing this. Since many of the posts are screen caps of text, this is making many posts completely illegible. The artifacting makes the text unreadable.

Well said-I feel the same.

I mean the real comparison is just: did she get enough votes, in states that Clinton lost, where if those people had all voted for Clinton, then Clinton would have won that state. I don’t know the answer, but even if the numbers did cover the margin, I think saying Stein is therefore a spoiler is problematic for a few reasons:

1. It ignores the very real number of voters who chose not to vote democratic or vote at all simply because of Clinton as candidate.
2. it ignores massive mistakes made by a hubristic campaign that couldn’t fathom losing to trump.
3. it supposes that people that voted green, would have gritted their teeth and instead voted Clinton, which is not a safe assumption.

Regarding OP’s argument: if Stein is a spoiler, than the libertarians are also spoilers. Since her being a spoiler assumes a majority of her votes would have gone democratic, we can take the same liberty and assume the libertarians would have instead opted for trump. If they had larger vote numbers than the Green Party got, as OP is saying above, then they cancel out greens spoiler-ness, and in fact represent a slight spoiler in favor of the democrats. I don’t really buy this read for the reasons I mentioned above, but OP’s point still kinda stands.

I’m not personally interested in voting for stein, I’ve heard enough weird stuff about her over the years that I’m not comfortable with her as a candidate. But I don’t buy the constant messaging that “third party votes are wasted votes”. My assumption with people that post these things is that they’re not suggesting it’s OK to not vote. And assumably, they also don’t want you to vote, but vote for the opposition. So it’s just the same old thing: vote the way I want you to.

Hmmm. I want some weird neolib romcom based off this picture. “This Summer. Pushed away from Brussels for doing their job, these two type A’s might just be tumbling into each others arms. They say climate change is going to make the Mediterranean hot, but they didn’t account for these two!”

I feel like originally it was a semi-safe taboo to break that made a standard porn setup seem more forbidden/risqué. It always seemed weird, like how many people have step siblings that also fantasize about them sexually, how big could this be? But it just kept on coming, so to speak.

Now I think it’s just a meme/SEO thing, where you have to include it even if the video is not even pretending to be about that. Also it happened around the same time that websites were pushing/pivoting into more content creator type things, and so it’s probably related to that as well. Like the annoying face+exaggerated reaction thing on YouTube…

Either way, always seemed whacky that everything the sites serve is almost completely step-porn on the front page.

I read the article, it definitely doesn’t bother to think about how something like this would be implemented, but certainly seems to be referring to a dynamic Limiting system… good luck.

I haven’t read the article, so just spitballing here: I have to assume the approach here is to electronically govern the engine to go no faster than the highest speed limit. I don’t know what the limits are in California, but where I live that’d mean the car would be limited to 80mph. If it was electronic, it could be adjusted if then limits were changed.

Otherwise, it’d be insane, and require the crazy infrastructure you describe. And they simply don’t have the money or the wherewithal to build an actual coverage that would allow the limiter to dynamically scale all the time.

Alternatively, I suppose you could imagine a hybrid system—ie an overall limited engine to the max limit, and then some sort of transponder that would throttle the limit down if you were near an important speed limit zone, like a school, which they could manage to deploy a transmitter at… still seems technologically challenging for the state to really pull off consistently though.

Either way, yeah not a fan or including more required tracking tech in vehicles. I don’t think I’d really hate a reasonably limited car—I really can’t justify needing to drive over 80 ever really, even in an emergency, but it would drive me insane to have the car just magically throttling down whenever it thought it was time to. See

Yeah that’s certainly what it seems like.

The radiation warning is near a different atoll, so hard to say if the above is related or not, but it’s kinda blowing my mind how limited reporting is on the subject. It feels like it’s being suppressed in English language media.