Vance, while clearly evil, is intelligent and flexible. I think that with some help he could find serious negotiators to send, and then he’d just need to make sure that there is clear communication.
To be clear, I don’t think he will do that, because he’s also a coward, but I think it is within his ability to do so.
You’re right, I should have been more explicit that I don’t count our amoeba EU leaders as people.
I think a lot of Europeans genuinely believe in human rights and a rules-based world order. And it would serve their interests too (in a multipolar world, having rules that apply to all is favorable to all). But they’re also cowards and want the USA to be world police and uphold this order, and it has always been convenient to look the other way as long as it was brown people on the receiving end of the Empire’s violence.
Because all sides have so much to lose, so they’ll pursue maximalist goals. The US retreating essentially means giving up the Gulf and by extension the Middle East, which is central to their doctrine of energy domination and a huge part of their leverage over Asia.
Iran on the other hand is fighting for its survival and needs to expel the US from the Gulf to ensure they can nevet attack them again.
They never cared about international law or right and wrong. It was always just a tool to bludgeon the other team with, and now that the tool is turning against them they’re dropping it like a broken toy.
I don’t think a path for deescalation exists anymore. JD Vance could maybe have taken the reigns by referring to Trump’s ill health, promised to send more competent negotiators who could meet Iran in good faith, and essentially dropped Israel to save America (or at least give it a few more good years).
But that’s a very tall order, and he just went out to claim Iran is designing nuclear suicide vests, so I guess he watched Wag the Dog and took some inspiration.
Why watch the night sky when you can watch these new exciting ads on your phone?
I think you’re right. It’s a bit of a dance with the devil as far as your own abilities are concerned. If we could have exoskeletons that would make us 40x stronger, would our bodies atrophy in the same way, and would we accept it?
And yet, I wouldn’t argue against the objective utility of an exoskeleton.
Well, I think to most of us, language is extremely closely tied to our actual thoughts. So verbal expression is at the very least part of the thinking process.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just not faced with the abuses of LLMs the way you are? I don’t regularly experience people who clearly skipped the effort and just let an LLM do the thinking for them. (It happens, and it’s problematic, but at in my experience it’s rare.) And it’s possible that it’s just because my bubble haven’t caught up yet.
I find it really difficult to engage with this because it’s so obviously motivated by fear. And to be clear, there’s a lot to be afraid of with LLMs and generative AI, because the avenues for abuse are vast. However, the utility is also immense, and I really do find it an incredible curiosity that to so many Lemmy users generative AI is just bad, as though it can’t really do anything properly.
We live in an age where China spits out cute propaganda cartoons about the Iran war almost in real time, at a much faster pace than South Park in its prime, and you can’t be a little bit amazed? Where the fuck is your sense of wonder, man?
And I get it, mediocre people use AI to do dumb shit and it’s infuriating, and evil corporations use it to compile kill lists, and if we let it take away our ability to write creatively, to compose new music, to write new code, then we atrophy perhaps the most important part of ourselves and we’ll live in a poorer world as a result. But that’s an us problem in the end, not a tech problem. If we want to avoid a future like that, we’ll have to accept the fact that LLMs are here to stay and figure out how to reconcile that fact with a better future.
I do not agree with this at all. Some of the smartest people I know have severe dyslexia. And those are not just extremes, all of us exist on a spectrum where we have strengths and weaknesses, and not all of us can be literary geniuses.
The fact that capitalism promotes mediocre bootlickers to positions of power has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology. Of course it will be exploited by these exact same people - all the more reason why we shouldn’t give them a monopoly on what’s genuinely a transformative technology.
This is a bit alarmist I think. It’s about how you use it. If your prompt is “please write a funny story about a bunny” you’ll get slop. If you write a full-ass Wikipedia article and ask it to simplify and punctuate long passages for increased legibility you can get valuable feedback.
Propagandist is your opinion. He’s a journalist because of the press pass that he’s holding, that’s why I used the literally signifier.
He is still literally a journalist whether you like it or not. FOX News says their content is entertainment, but I wouldn’t bring that point up if one of their reporters was violently targeted in their line of work.
Or, maybe rather than a threat or an implication, it’s a vent for what a toxic upbringing many of us had.
A modest proposal if I ever heard one!