It’s not only misogyny.

Social media absolutely removes the inhibitions of just about all kinds of assholes, builds pat-each-other-on-the-back support groups for them by putting them together with like minded assholes and then algorithmically shovels all that shit on everybody else because anything that elicits strong emotions means more clicks and anger from being offended is one such emotion.

By the way, this also applies to unhealthy gender expectations on males (including misandry), though this being The Guardian I expect this is about the UK, which IMHO (having lived there and also elsewhere in Europe) is a country with serious problems when it comes to gender expectations around women and insidious “benevolent” sexism (“benevolent” not because it’s good but because it follows the whole “women are fragile creatures” and subsequent subtle disemplowering of women “to protect them” or because “they’re emotional creatures”) which far too often taints the articles in The Guardian because they’re very much from the British upper-middle class Acceptable Feminism, which tends to underestimate the strength of women and favor “protection” “solutions” over empowerment and agency.

So whilst I absolutely believe in all of this and in misogyny online being very bad, especially in certain countries, the choice of focusing on misogyny rather than as a whole in the problem of social media’s Profit Driven amplification of societal dysfunctions in general, is very much a typical privileged British Upper Middle Class “Third Wave Feminist” perspective and choice.

It still makes no difference: in the bully pattern of behaviour early concessions just increase the likelihood and intensity of latter violence, since they’re read by the bully as proof of weakness hence the victim is seen as less likely to be able to violently reciprocate.

Note how the whole Greenland Invasion thing, which came after the whole strong-arming and concessions on Trade interaction, was only walked back after several large European nations started deploying trigger forces to Greenland and planning for a military confrontation with the US.

The EU leadership originally displayed the same kind of reaction to Russian aggression at a point were Russia was back to following a logic of “Might makes right” in Crimea and with Georgia (same mindset as the US under Trump) and that led to the recent invasion and attempt at full conquest of Ukraine, so how long does it takes for those crooks to learn the lesson that certain kinds of leaders in very nationalist countries only ever respond to actual pain and proof of Might (not necessarilly purelly of the Military kind) and see attempts at finding a common ground as weakness.

I mean, any half way competent leadership of a large nation of trade block should have had Psychological Profiles made on at least the leaders of major nations.

Almost a decade in Investment Banking and I started reading a lot about Economics (from books, not random websites) after the 2008 Crash to try and understand what the fuck had happenned and what was being done about it.

That said, take what I wrote with a large pinch of salt, especially the first part which is an idea that I have of how that part of things work (based on Mathematics and Finance industry knowledge), not a proper peer reviewed theory from Economics.

I’ve pieced together a lot of knowledge I read about with understanding I gained from the inside of the Finance Industry (such as their way of valuing future money as well as things like fair value and fundamentals when it comes to markets), but the assembled thing as a whole is my own theory.

That said, my money is were my mouth is, and I’ve been highly invested in Gold (known as the ultimate safe asset) since 2012, and that has so far returned 500% on the original investment during that period, thus so far I seem to be at least partially right about the direction things are going (some kind over overall devaluation of traditional strong currencies and near-stagflation getting worse as the inherent disfunctionalities of the current value allocation system make it harder and harder for it to keep going as is), though that doesn’t mean I’m right on the Why.

PS: Recommended books to read - “This Time is Different” for an Historical perspective on Economic Crashes and “Freakonomics” for a look of on human decision making in an Economics context (which turns out to be very different from the homo economicus human behaviour model that underpins Free Market Economics theories) from Behaviour Economics which is the only part of Economics that actually conducts experiments.

The British version of Rule Of Law!

It’s not by chance that they’ve been talking about a “final solution for the Palestinian problem” for years.

Mainly the poorer owe that to the richer.

Also the richer owe that to each other.

The last part could sorta be unwound in a more or less peaceful way (though very interventionist and the amounts involved are so large that we would see an explosion of corruption as the wealthy tried to extract gains from it by hook and by crook), but the first part would require a Revolution that tore down all existing ownership structures.

Just remember that every year the World’s Economy has to grow enough to cover the interest rate payments in all outstanding debt (or money itself has to inflate away fast enough to offset it, and since interest rates are naturally set up to be above inflation - otherwise Financial Institutions would be losing money - that’s unlikely)

There are two ways to offset this:

• Reduce the amount of outstanding debt.
• Lower interest rates (which is what was done after the 2008 Crash, leading to the slowest recovery from a Crash in at least a century) so that for the same amount of debt there is less interest to pay.

Overall debt is increasing as per the article.

Interest rates are below historical average since what was done after 2008 which was supposed to be temporary wasn’t fully wound back, so there’s a lot less room there for central banks to do something about it.

Actually solving the underlying problems behind the 2008 Crash was pushed to the Future with some interest rate engineering, and it looks a lot like The Future Is Today, and this time around rather than just an over-indebtness plus Finance overextension problem, we seem to have over-indebtness, a massive Tech bubble (like in 2000) AND asset price bubbles in all manner of asset classes, from economically peripheral things like crypto to core things like housing.

I’ve been expecting a massive crash since I saw what passed for a “solution” back in 2009-12, but shit is turning up to be way worse than I expected due to all the additional resource malallocation and mispriceing in the Economy.

LOL!

Absolutelly!

With the US the EU should ACT, not talk - there is no point in talking to actors which are neither honorable nor reasonable: even if they agree with you it means nothing at all because their actions and their words don’t match.

Removing itself from any treaties with the US that allow recognition of American Copyrights and Patents in the EU would be a wonderful start, and a proper crackdown on the many crimes of American tech companies operating in the European Free Trade area would also be wonderful.

Sure, a proper trade war with the US would also hurt the EU, but better a short sharp pain as that rotten tooth is pulled than leaving it there as the rot spreads out from it (which it already has and we in the EU are getting a lot of needless problems from things like damage to European innovation due to accepting US-style IP like Business Patents, anti-circunvention laws and ridiculously long Copyrights and the nasty societal effects of the practices of US tech companies like Meta, Google and even Palantir).

The US has turned into an anchor you don’t want to be tied to so that it won’t pull you down as it quickly sinks.

Oh, look, dealing with a bully by negotiating with him hasn’t worked.

What! A! Surprise!

Nowadays I’m fully convinced that the politicians in the EU Commission are either profoundly incompetent, rotten as fuck, or both.

“Computer says” is a pretty standard excuse for doing fucked up shit as it adds a complex form of indirection and obfuscation between the will of a human and the actual actions that result from that will.

Doesn’t work as an excuse with people who actually make the software that makes the computer “say” something (because the complexity of what us used is far less for them and thus they know what’s behind it and that the software is just an agent of somebody’s will), but it seems to work with even non-expert (technology fan) techies, more so with non-techies.

With AI the people using the computer as an excuse just doubled down on this because in this case the software wasn’t even explicitly crafted to do what it does, it was trained (though in practice you can sorta guide it in some direction or other by chosing what you train it with) further obscuring the link between the will of a human which has decided what it does (or at least, decided which of the things it ended up doing after training are acceptable and which require changes to training) and the output of a computer system.

Considering that just about the entirety of the Justice System. Legislative System and Regulatory System are technically ignorant, using the “computer says” as an excuse often results in profit enhancing outcomes, incentivising “greed above all” people to use it to confuse, block or manipulate such systems.

Nowadays it’s filled with giant, powerful, activelly predactorial entities using teams of Psychologists to come up with ways to subvert human falibilities and weaknesses to their ends no matter how much it fucks up their victims.

Back in the day pretty much the worst that could happen to you was getting hurt when trying to do for fun some kind of explosive based on a FAQ from Usenet.

What was like a sleepy village with some shady corners has been turned into Blade Runner’s Los Angeles whilst some governments are trying to make it more like Mega City One.

Surely he at least knows the name of the one he used to carry around as a human shield after the Health Care Insurance CEO got executed?!

Even the LLM part might be considered Plagiarism.

Basically, unlike humans it cannot assemble an output based on logical principles (i.e. assembled a logical model of the flows in a piece of code and then translate it to code), it can only produce text based on an N-space of probabilities derived from the works of others it has “read” (i.e. fed to it during training).

That text assembling could be the machine equivalent of Inspiration (such as how most programmers will include elements they’ve seen from others in their code) but it could also be Plagiarism.

Ultimately it boils down to were the boundary between Inspiration and Plagiarism stands.

As I see it, if for specific tasks there is overwhelming dominance of trained weights from a handful of works (which, one would expect, would probably be the case for a C-compiler coded in Rust), then that’s a lot more towards the Plagiarism side than the Inspiration side.

Granted, it’s not the verbatim copying of an entire codebase that would legally been deemed Plagiarism, but if it’s almost entirely a montage made up of pieces from a handful of codebases, could it not be considered a variant of Plagiarism that is incredibly hard for humans to pull off but not so for an automated system?

Note that obviously the LLM has no “intention to copy”, since it has no will or cognition at all, what I’m saying is that the people who made it have intentionally made an automated system that copies elements of existing works, which normally assembles the results from very small textual elements (same as a person who has learned how letters and words work can create a unique work from letters and words) but with the awareness that in some situations that automated system they created can produce output based on an amount of sources which is very low to the point that even though it’s assembling the output token by token, it’s pretty much just copying whole blocks from those sources same as a human manually copying a text from a document to a different document would.

In summary, IMHO LLMs don’t always plagiarize, but can sometimes do it when the number of sources that ended up creating the volume of the N-dimensional probabilistic space the LLM is following for that output is very low.

Yeah, anybody with eyes and a working brain back during the Leave Referendum saw this coming.

I lived in Britain as an EU immigrant until the actual Brexit and saw the whole shitshow from the inside.

I say NO to EU membership for Britain - we don’t need another Fascist country in the EU with voting and even veto rights on things that affect all 470 million of non-Britons in it, especially when 1/3 of the population there were very clear about how much they detest the rest of Europeans (the Racism against other Europeans became very overt there when the Leave Referendum started).

Britain should never have the rights of an EU member until that country has a serious cultural, political and social revolution.

Britain becoming a member of the European Free Trade Area in some way might be alright (though they’re highly likely to try and abuse such a position, as they already did abuse free trade access as EU members, for example by de facto being an uncontrolled gateway for importing non-compliant products into the EU market).

British elites having a saying on how the EU is run by using their country’s votes and veto would not be alright, especially in light of all the authoritarian shit coming out over there - from insane civil society surveillance, mandatory online ID and even treating those implementing end-to-end encryption as anti-state actors to anti-Demonstration legislation and imprisonment of people demonstrating against the Gaza Genocide as “Terrorist Supporters” - which manages to beat even Hungary.

It’s bad enough to have EU countries turning Fascist, but bringing into the EU the country in Europe which after Russia and Belarus is the most de facto authoritarian and most similar to present day MAGA America (though their Fascism is painted in “posh” rather than in “strongman”) would be insane.

It’s even simpler than that: using an LLM to write a C compiler is the same as downloading an existing open source implementation of a C compiler from the Internet, but with extra steps, as the LLM was actually fed with that code and is just re-assembling it back together but with extra bugs - plagiarism hidden behind an automated text parrot interface.

A human can beat the LLM at that by simply finding and downloading an implementation of that more than solved problem from the Internet, which at worse will take maybe 1h.

The LLM can “solve” simple and well defined problems because its basically plagiarizing existing code that solves those problems.

The problem is that LLMs don’t generate “an answer” as a whole, they just generate tokens (generally word-sized, but not always) for the next text element given the context of all the text elements (the whole conversation) so far and the confidence level is per-token.

Further, the confidence level is not about logical correctness, it’s about “how likely is this token to appear in this context”.

So even if you try using token confidence you still end up stuck due to the underlying problem that the LLMs architecture is that of a “realistic text generator” and hence that confidence level is all about “what text comes next” and not at all about the logical elements conveyed via text such as questions and answers.

• How do you know when Trump is lying?
• His mouth is open.

Democrats: Hard Neoliberalism at home, Fascism abroad.

Republicans: Fascism everywhere.