TheChurn

Humans are intelligent animals, but humans are not only intelligent animals. We do not make decisions and choose which beliefs to hold based solely on sober analysis of facts.

That doesn't change the general point that a model given the vast corpus of human knowledge will prefer the most oft-repeated bits to the true bits, whereas we humans have muddled our way through to some modicum of understanding of the world around us by not doing that.

But the most current information does not mean it is the most correct information.

I could publish 100 papers on Arxiv claiming the Earth is, in fact, a cube - but that doesn't make it true even though it is more recent than the sphere claims.

Some mechanism must decide what is true and send that information to train the model - that act of deciding is where the actual intelligence in this process lives. Today that decision is made by humans, they curate the datasets used to train the model.

There's no intelligence in these current models.

Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.

Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.

That isn't what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.

This isn't to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can't sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.

The raw spending figure isn't what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia's economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU's in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.

This isn't a 'Russia stronk, Europe bad' post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn't, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.

Windshields have been laminated for decades. Side windows were tempered glass for decades, and since 2020 are mandated to be laminated glass.

A virus doesn't care if the host lives or dies. Just like evolution doesn't care if YOU live or die, so long as it happens after you have kids.

A virus only has to have a living host long enough to spread to others, and the long asymptomatic infectious period observed with this coronavirus already fits that bill.

Think of Rabies, nearly 100% fatal, still incredibly widespread and infectious.

SS and Medicare are largely funded by dedicated taxes (the payroll tax), and the spending is mandatory - it is spelled out in the laws that created these programs.

The discretionary part of the budget is where general taxes on income, inheritance, etc. go, and where everything else the government does is financed. Foreign aid, infrastructure investment, grants, disaster relief.. everything besides SS Medicare/Medicaid.

US Military spending is more than half of discretionary spending.

I'm household terms (which is a bad analogy) after paying the mortgage and utility bills, we spend more than half of what is left of the paycheck on guns and ammo.

The terms seem agreeable?

The terms that restrict the size of the Ukrainian military, bar Ukraine from receiving foreign assistance to rebuild its military, forbid it from seeking security guarantees from any country or bloc, ... The terms that would have made it trivial for Russia to further invade at any point in the future?

Those terms seem agreeable?

A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.

The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.

The short answer is it depends.

The long answer is that treaties and international law are pretty window dressing around the utterly anarchic reality of geopolitics. If states saw it as in their best interest to allow Poland to fall to Russia, they would allow it regardless of whatever treaties they previously signed.

Article 5 provides that the alliance must support a member after an armed attack against them on their territory in Europe or North America. In plain reading, this would apply should Russia attack Polish soil regardless of who started the war. In reality, it really depends.

No one (in the west) wants a 'real' war. War is a distraction from making money. If Poland expanded the war by joining in, I doubt they would receive the full support of the alliance.

Copilot is GPT under the hood, it just starts with a search step that finds (hopefully) relevant content and then passes that to GPT for summarization.