At a conceptual level, it makes 100% sense that companies are moving away from bespoke engines and towards a standardized engine. This is something you see in many different industries. Spending a whole bunch of money and effort when 95% of your requirements are the same as everyone else is a bit silly.

However, you’re completely right that there’s the same danger as in other industries where the ‘boring software infrastructure’ gets standardized and outsourced: a niche monopoly able to exploit their position. What tends to happen in the long run is an open source project for that infrastructure run by an NGO with the industry members (in this case AAA game companies) on the board of directors.

That sounds like a just so story.

Spanish raiders could and did very easily talk to the locals they were subjugating to find out more about the plant. It was often described at that point as “a kind of truffle”. It was considered for a long time to be suitable for peasants and slaves, but not anyone with the option to eat ‘better’ food. The real reasons it took so long for potatoes to catch on are deeply rooted cultural norms around farming, class stigma around this ‘peasant food’, and worries around it being poisonous.

At every stage of it’s introduction into european diets, they knew how to cook it.

Can you please point to where I said I was the arbiter of what that change would look like or what the yardistick should be?

The equivalence here which is not broken imho, and if broken I need to change my POV, is local autonomy for both EU citizens and Iranians are of prime importance. Both EU citizens and Iranians deserve to control their own respective governments, free of outside influence. Both EU & Iranian people deserve to be in charge of their own day to day lives, without an imposition of any particular religious behavior or set of norms.

And taking into context that articles and opinions of “look at how evil and bad and irredeemable country and its people is” is apologizing for authoritarianism. If you are not cheering for the overthrow of the Iranian government simply because the US would do everything to make something worse result from it, you are a “tankie” and what blahaj and .world mean by the word.

After talking with you and seeing your opinions, I don’t think you’re a campist (or ‘tankie’). There’s way too much nuance for that. I may disagree with some of your points, but I follow your logic and you don’t seem to be just repeating propaganda. I obviously can’t speak for any instance admins or other users anywhere on the fediverse, I’m just talking for myself and my opinions.

Russian paranoia of a hostile military alliance moving closer to its borders (NATO was supposedly only supposed to defend against the Warsaw Pact, though NATO pre-dated it)

The issue with that line of thinking is that NATO is a voluntary alliance. Generally speaking, here in eastern Europe, countries join NATO when they feel threatened by Russia. We’ve seen that pattern play out over and over: Russia plays brinksmanship over their border, violating airspace, testing limits, etc, and countries join. Finland and Sweden specifically joined in direct response to the Russo-Ukraine war.

A large part of the accusations of “tankie” is not agreeing with “Russia evil orcs, Ukrainians are perfect elven defenders of Western Civilization”.

I hope I’ve made it clear that that is not at all my point of view on the topic. Again, can’t talk for anyone else.

But ever acknowledging that Russia would be upset by the CIA helping to install a hostile government on its border, with plans to join a hostile military alliance, is tankieism.

The issue with this is that most of the countries involved have relatively recent memories of Russification, forced compliance with first the Russian Empire, then the USSR. I absolutely agree that the CIA would and has helped these movements, but as you say, the CIA can’t wave a magic wand and summon these movements. They have to exist, and they have to be large.

This has become significantly more apparent since 2022 where the actual conscripts that are grabbed off the streets are sent to their death as cannon fodder, so that Azov or Aidar can take advantage of the softened line and expended munitions to try to attack a possible weak point.

This sounds like an inversion of the classic “USSR/Russian meatwave” meme. It’s ridiculous when people talk about it when it comes to Russians, as if they have some mythical predisposition to throwing their soldiers lives away for no gain, and it’s equally ridiculous when people attribute that to the Ukrainian military. Both sides have suffered grueling losses due to the nature of the combat, and the learning curve with modern drone combat.

I hope though, while you’re almost definitely aware of the war crimes of the Azov and Aidar battalions, you’re also aware of the long list of war crimes of various Russian units. From the intentional striking of civilian targets (including hospitals), torture of civilians, abduction of children, gang rapes, and more. I 100% agree that Ukrainians aren’t ‘perfect elven defenders of the west’, but let’s be very very clear about what the Russian military is doing.

NATO: only time it’s ever been triggered was for the US “war on terror”. A smaller more local NATO that ACTUALLY focuses purely on regional defence rather than some regional defence, some helping US imperialism in the middle east would be much better.

EU: Very imperfect, but the best chance we’ve got to stand up and support ourselves without being beholden to either Russia or the US. If we want real autonomy, we’ve got to work together regionally. Individual European countries stand no chance solo on the world stage.

Iranian government: Rightfully paranoid, but that paranoia seeps into every aspect of it’s interaction with it’s population. I do wish they could somehow modify their government to allow more individual liberties, clamp down on human rights abuses while keeping the aspects of it that have allowed it to resist the US. I don’t know how that might look, but it’s definitely not happening now that the US have gone “hold my beer” and committed war crimes that make what Iran did look trivial by comparison. The population definitely can’t push for reforms when in an active shooting war where infrastructure that civilians rely on is being deleted.

Thank you for not strawmanning me and actually walking through your experiences with others who are “anti-tankie” rather than assuming the worst of me.

I legitimately don’t have time to respond to absolutely all of this in huge detail, so assume that if I didn’t respond to a specific point I just didn’t have much to say about it.

It forces the unfortunate position of having to be wary due to consequences and not principle.

I do generally agree with this in principle. The governmental structure of Iran, for example, makes a lot of sense if your explicit goal is to be as coup-proof as possible. This is very much a double-edged sword: a country built on legitimate paranoia often sees any protest as foreign interference, regardless of the reality.

Kittenrulz and most “tankies” do not say that it is good and just, though I will admit there are a minority that take Russia’s side

Maybe I’m just taking crazy pills here, but most of the opinions on the war over seen here can be boiled down to “Evil Ukrainian Nazis bad, Russia good”. That is legitimately what I see during the rare moments I look over here.

full embrace of overt Nazism within sectors of the Ukraine government and armed forces

It can’t be “some sectors” and a “full embrace” at the same time, can it? There were some well known units that were very explicitly neonazi, but at no point did they have any control over the civilian government or military high command.

Though that was a convenient talking point for Russian officials rather than a real motivation

Thank you for acknowledging that.

Sorry, I’m confused. Were you responding to me? When did I bring up Uyghurs or claim that Iranian people protesting justifies an invasion? When did I claim every Russian is responsible for the decisions of the Russian government? I feel like you’re shadowboxing an imagined version of my position.

Also, I went into in great length in the other thread, I think you’re very very wrong about Russia & Ukraine. What you wrote of my supposed position is yet again a parody strawman.

EDIT: Also, I’m not making a quantitative argument except in the context that the amount campists trust these governments to always be honest and truthful is absolute, while anything the US government says is always evil lying propaganda. Quantitatively, the US produces and disseminates far more propaganda. That doesn’t give people the excuse to blindly believe everything everyone else says though.

Removed by mod

Shouldn’t you put developments in context to avoid getting swept up in a propaganda push?

That’s reasonable. I personally knew a lady who was beaten, imprisoned and starved for a week by the morality police for forgetting her hijab at home though. I struggle to think of a context that would justify that. This was many years ago though, as I understand it the morality police and their systematic human rights abuses were largely unofficially abolished in 2023 after mass protests.

The new wave of protests from this year were largely about inflation and cost of living, as far as I understand. You don’t get to thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries via effective crowd management.

Is it imperialist? Russia is doing this to expand profit seeking for its national-level monopolies or otherwise export capital? If so they are doing a bad job.

In order: yes, yes, yes, and also yes.

My opinion is that the primary motive of the original full-scale war, which they honestly thought they could get done in 3 days, was primarily to expand the workforce due to their crippled demographics, while simultaneously scoring an easy propaganda win domestically, giving a black eye to the US and EU, and get a hold of the rare earth minerals which were being prospected in eastern Ukraine at the time. It also didn’t hurt that before they bombed it, the area was relatively industrialized. Due to the incompetence of authoritarians in general and their inability to admit defeat (just look at the US in Iran today if you want a 2nd example), they are forced to keep going to save face no matter how pointless it is and how many people die.

In terms of motivation for Russia to continue their war long past the point of sunk costs, it probably also doesn’t help that because they’re fully in a war economy now, the end of the war will cause their economy to crash.

As a capstone to this: you don’t get a pass on imperialism just because you’re bad at it. If that was the case, Mussolini did nothing wrong.

I honestly don’t know what this is even about. Maybe Japan remilitarizing?

Take your pick. Saber rattling with Taiwan, encroaching on the Phillipine’s maritime waters, skirmishing with India and Pakistan on their border, and more.

I have never seen someone saying anything remotely in the vein you are referencing

I see every other day here references here to Ukrainian Nazis, Russian self-defense, etc. As an Eastern European who’s heard second-hand from refugees what’s going on in detail, I hope you can understand why that’d piss me off a little. So afraid of falling for US propaganda so they’re gobbling up Russian propaganda instead.

Cringe memes aside, anyone who can say with a straight face that poor little Putin was forced into this war against his will has obviously not been listening to the words coming out of his mouth.

If you want a point of view that isn’t in your bubble, what many people call “tankies” are in fact campists. By that I mean they commonly engage in authoritarian apologia for anyone purportedly “against the west”.

Iranian government brutalizing its own people? Butwutaboutdawest. Russia waging an imperialist war to absorb a neighbour? Butwutaboutnato. China threatening it’s neighbours? Butwutaboutdawest.

Nothing is ever their fault, any atrocity committed is either a false flag or misinformation because the only thing that matters is the team on the shirt, not any actual actions.

God forbid somebody can be against US imperialism and against Russian imperialism simultaneously, that’s much too nuanced.

don’t bother engaging w anything else.

Because it’s a waste of time engaging when the chances are very high that any well-reasoned counterpoint will simply get removed.

It’s also that writing complex 3-dimensional characters is hard. It’s much simpler to write a straightforward “good guy” or “bad guy” than it is a nuanced character who does some good things and some bad things all connected to core motivations that drive their reasoning.

It is good news, I just hope Count Binface’s solution gets seriously considered: dump him in a river he’s responsible for and see how he likes his handiwork.

He is actually British. Apart from that, agree with the rest. Especially D.

I think you may be misunderstanding the situation. He’s telling AI critics to stop complaining or fork. If that happens, the main branch will still have AI submissions, and the fork will be the AI-free one.

Important to note: Torvalds is not an LLM evangelist, nor does he just accept AI slop uncritically. The official policy is that LLM written/assisted code is fine, but the quality must hit the bar expected of Linux kernel submissions, and the submitter takes full responsibility for the code correctness whether they personally wrote it or not. Just submitting LLM code with no verification or tests is a great way of getting banned from submitting pull requests and getting a very angry email from Linus.

The point is I don’t think LLMs normally use copyrighted code in a way that would hurt open source projects.

I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer, and copyright for code was a hot mess even before LLMs got involved. With how many opportunistic copyright/patent trolls there are and how easily convinced judges have been in the past, it could go either way.

Lol, so how do humans code in comparison?

The good programmers normally code by breaking down the problem into constituent parts and logically working through the problem, step by step. What differentiates this from tokenization is that instead of just looking for code that is similar for a similar problem, programmers can usually understand the effects of each line of code, visualize what the state of each variable will be in that step (or dump out the variables to look directly if unsure), and then move on to the next step. This logical problem-solving approach is fundamentally different from a tokenization+noise looking for a similar-looking problem approach. For one thing, you can solve problems that haven’t been solved before.

LLMs don’t “create”. Under the hood, they’re tokenizing the queries, looking for “clouds” of tokens that are similar to the query, then returning a sequence of tokens (with some random noise thrown in) that match what their training data says the answer should be.

In short: all LLM code is an amalgamation of their training data by definition. If there’s nothing similar in there, it’s literally not possible for it to be part of any response.

Maybe it was a mistake to try and use natural language for this kind of job, it’s too fuzzy and interpretable. Maybe we need a new language, one with a much stricter syntax and no room for interpretation. If you make it simple enough, and use some natural language for important keywords, shouldn’t be too difficult to learn.

We could call it “language for programming” or something like that.

Eh, who am I kidding, that’ll never catch on.

Harold Wilson, Clement Attlee