• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 8th, 2023

help-circle

  • Norway is actually a good example of this – where pro-social regulatory policies (i.e. beneficial not from the perspective of capital, but from the perspective of actual societal conditions) are used to help mitigate some of the BS that capitalism produces.

    Regardless… Yeah, it’s a problem with capitalism. It’s a problem that stems from the literal core of the ‘system’: utilizing ‘capital’ to find opportunities for the creation and extraction of ‘surplus’ from labor and its products.

    It’s great that regulation is able to reign in, in some cases, the deeply criminal BS that such a system naturally produces… But it seems like a huge overreach to assume this is possible “globally” (as it would need to be for a blanket statement like that to be true).















  • What they’re getting towards (one thing, anyways) is that “indistinguishable to the model” and “the same” are two very different things.

    IIRC, one possibility is that LLMs which learn from one another will make such incremental changes to what’s considered “acceptable” or “normal” language structuring that, over time, more noticeable linguistic changes begin to emerge that go unnoticed by the models.

    As it continues, this phenomena creates a “positive feedback loop” in which the gap progressively widens – still undetected, because the quality of training data is going down – to the point where models basically “collapse” in their effectiveness.

    So even if their output is indistinguishable now, how the tech is used (I guess?) will determine whether or not a self-destructive LLM echo chamber is produced.



  • Capitalism and free markets are separate things within the economic “sphere” of society. Capitalism is an economic doctrine that focuses on directing production through private capital; free markets (in theory) ensure “equal access” to markets for products (as compared to monopoly or (economic, not necessarily drug) cartel markets which restrict access).

    Over in the “public sphere”, governments decide whether to jump in bed with private capital (often resulting in monopolies or cartels in economic marketplacs), or to make & enforce regulations that protect the (so-called) free market.

    Or to make and enforce regulations that protect consumers – i.e. human f-ing beings – and enrich local economies without protectionism and “zero sum games”, but I guess we shouldn’t get too carried away here ;)


  • How do american consumers keep trucks like this out?

    I mean by not buying the imports, but at the same time it’s hard to ignore the impact of not having them visible/available for purchase, decades of cultural engineering related to the auto industry here, etc.

    Not sure they belong on this list next to entities that actively craft market conditions to benefit american auto makers (and themselves) financially.


  • Yeah, this does seem like a kind of inaccurate generalization.

    Does this mean you honestly wouldn’t have a preference if you were dropped into a random “place” in one of these countries’ societies and had to live the rest of your life there?

    It’s easy to say “Hey, plus a few ethnic cleansings, minus an intentional lack of economic development in favor of political corruption, plus a couple of highly extractive, insecure, and immoral sets of socio-economic conditions… and I mean we’re all basically the same, amirite??”… But while each country’s civil society is kinda fucked in some fundamental ways, they seem like unique ways that are hard to compare “apples to apples”.

    EDIT: Having said that, the issues in each country strongly depend on dividing lines between various “peoples”, and a manufactured assurance that your conditions are the best that they could possibly be, so…