I think I kind of understand why the Soviets were able to industrialize that fast and win an existential war against the mighty Wehrmacht.
The so called purges from late 20s to to the 30s were Stalin eliminating these 5th columnists.
The Soviets had a lot of Western assistance with industrializing. Ford in particular played a huge role in the Gorky factories.
The Wehrmacht lost because numbers kind of matter in war. When you look at the natural resources Russia had, the population disparity between Russia and Germany, and the size of territory the Germans attempted to conquer, it really wasn't a close contest at all.
Stalin's purges had absolutely nothing with removing any "5th Column." The White Movement was thoroughly defeated by 1921 as were the Mensheviks etc. Stalin purged his officer class because he was supremely paranoid. And while he killed many of the officers, many were sent to the gulags and recalled to service after the German invasion in 1941.
The entire concept of a 5th column is just fear-mongering by most countries who faced defeat due to their incompetence. And the term was used by countries to impose draconian controls and oppression.
> Isn't the logical action for EU to launch massive pre-emptive strikes
To be clear, strikes wouldn't be "pre-emptive", Russia is already in a war, and it's entirely allowed for any nation to join the side of Ukraine. None of the rules of war prevent helping a friendly country by joining the fight.
I don’t believe the leadership sees Russia as an existential threat in Brussels. Baltics and Poland see it differently.
A pre-emptive strike would be expensive and immediately retcon into making Putin be the good guy - he’s long said NATO is the aggressor. Best to make invading EU to be too expensive to be worth it.
I think the bigger risk currently that Europe faces is the low and mid level corruption where Russian agents extend their tendrils into government structures in EU.
This has already happened. Just as in the US, all of the far-right "movements" in the EU are Russian fronts.
The two biggest targets are the UK and France, because both have an independent nuclear deterrent. If those are captured by puppets, expect nuclear explosions over European capitals.
This is not hyperbole. Russian government insiders have made it absolutely, unambiguously clear that Europe must be "crushed."
As a direct quote.
The real tragedy is oligarch complicity. Oligarchs and aristocrats in the US, UK, and EU have decided they have more in common with their Russian counterparts than with the native populations of their respective countries.
How many armies in the world, have ever had a person in uniform demand that "the other army must be crushed" ? ok, is there any army that did not say that, to each other, or to an audience? Get a grip on the invective and do not blabber!
> This has already happened. Just as in the US, all of the far-right "movements" in the EU are Russian fronts.
And you, singlehandedly have the supreme insight into all these people, to ascribe motive on them? Impressive
or perhaps its possible that some people just have their own opinions that is not yours, and MAYBE has some overlap with russian? (assuming that to be true)
I bet you share many opinions with Putin, for example, I believe he considers exercise to be healthy, why, by your previous logic, that would make your health advice a russian front?
> Best to make invading EU to be too expensive to be worth it.
How do you propose to estimate how much it is worth doing it?
IMO, it is best is to make the kremlin government collapse by all mean necessary. Including sabotage, assassination, propaganda, confiscation, corruption/trahison. And preemptive strike if needs to be.
This worked great in every other country where some other country believed the situation will be more stable if you just topple the current regime, didn’t it?
It's not about "hating the western way of life" or any such silliness. They can hate whatever they want within their internationally recognized borders.
War is best prevented by robust deterrents. When it comes to belligerent fascist regimes who want to see how far you can be pushed, not responding to provocations and aggression forcefully makes larger-scale war more likely in the future.
That's simply not true. The US response to Pearl Harbor was proportional -- you attacked us, that's war, so now we're warring -- but that didn't mean staying on the defensive.
If it's known that Russia is using ships to attack Western infrastructure, blockading those ships is entirely proportional. A blockade, in this case, isn't so much an act of war, as it is a response to an act of war.
They shot some of our boats and we dropped portable suns onto two of their cities.
A proportional response would be to take out of one their fleets. We explicitly went disproportional when we conquered their entire nation and dismantled their empire.
I know it's supposed to be an oversimplification, but this is pretty shockingly ignorant of the scope, scale, and brutality of the Japanese campaign. They didn't merely "shoot some of our boats"; that's an egregious minimization of their culpability and the proportionality of their comeuppance. The Japanese launched a coordinated all-out assault not only on Pearl Harbor but also:
- The Philippines, a US territory, where tens of thousands of American soldiers were killed or captured and
subjected to the infamous Bataan Death March. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos are killed during invasion and occupation.
- Guam, also a US territory
- Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore: British territories
- Thailand, an independent kingdom
All this after having already invaded Manchuria and French Indochina, and then later going on to invade and occupy Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, New Guinea, and a whole slew of Pacific islands and atolls.
Not only did the Japs attack Pearl Harbor, formally declare war on the United States, enjoy an alliance with Germany and Italy who themselves declared war on the Unites States, and conquer or attempt to conquer all those places to build their empire; they also fought fanatically and with exceptional brutality, they committed countless atrocities (wanton murders, amputations and mutilations, gang rapes, sex slavery, vivisections, human experiments--you name it, they did it), they administered conquered territories cruelly, and they treated prisoners of war even more cruelly.
Considering all of the above, conquering the Japanese nation and ensuring their total defeat was not only justified (as I believe you'd agree), it was also entirely proportionate to their warmongering and brutality.
And in exchange we destroyed their empire and government
We did not respond proportionately, we responded disproportionately. I don’t know how this is even being argued by people that our response on WW2 to any of our belligerents was in measured proportion.
Like, it was the last time we went to total warfare and indiscriminately bombed civilian population centers
They were busily destroying empires and governments. How is the destruction of their empire and government disproportionate?
And certainly neither Germany nor Japan had any compunction about indiscriminately bombing civilians, let alone intentionally murdering many millions of them.
I said our response was disproportionate, at no point did I say it was unjust.
Walk softly and carry a big stick, is still applicable game theory and the big stick was not meant to be held back just because someone hit you with a smaller stick.
If you only respond in proportion to an adversary, they basically get to dictate the engagement. A strategy that leads to less violence overall is to apply disproportionate retaliation to any attacks, which signals to other players that you will make actions against you not a viable long term strategy
I generally agree with you there, I simply don't think firebombing Tokyo and even nuking a couple cities was disproportionate. Morally wrong? Maybe. The only way to achieve a necessary military effect? Probably not. But they certainly had it coming in spades.
The Japanese tried to firebomb the US, too; they simply weren't as successful[0]. They also had a nuclear program, and God knows they would have nuked the US first if they could have. There was no Mutually Assured Destruction back then, either--just unidrectional Assured Destruction. I'm glad the US got there first.
Consider the handy Wikipedia chart of WWII deaths[1]. The main instigators of the deadliest war in history, Germany and Japan, have fairly low total death rates and, in fact, comparatively low civilian death rates compared to the Allies.
Further I want to point out that 'proportionate' is not the same as 'equivalent'. A proportionate response doesn't mean you try to kill exactly the same number of troops or sink the same number of warships.
Finally I want to reiterate that I do generally agree with you about the value and deterrent effect of some perceived probability of a disproportionate response, or at least the value of unpredictability in general. That is not to say that I believe the Madman Theory is an optimal strategy over the long term, but I do think it can be played effectively as a short-term tactic.
Hey, thats exactly what Ahmed al Ahmed was thinking. He ripped rifle out of Bondi Beach terrorist hands but didnt shoot him immediately because that would be "disproportional". Terrorist ran back to his friend, pulled another gun from the bag and killed several more innocent people.
No, pre-emptively starting another war is not a good idea. But yes, the West should work hard to make sure their enemy loses the war it has already started.
So EUV is so easy to reverse engineer ? Haven't we been told by western analysts that it is the most complex machine ever made :that it has 400,000 parts and it's impossible to copy even if ASML gave them blueprints ?
Dario has been a reds scare jukebox for a while.Dario has for a year been trying to convince us how open source cCp AI bad and closed source American AI good.
Dario driven by the democratic ideals he holds dear has our best interests at heart.
Let us all support the banning of cCp's open source AI and welcome Dario's angelic firewall.
It's certainly both a lot more than distillation and at least some Chinese labs have been cloning OpenAI via distillation. That's why they instituted much tighter ID verification requirements earlier this year.
No, the reason you don't see many open source models coming from the rest-of-world (other than Mistral in France) is that you still need a ton of capital to do it. China can compete because the CCP used a combination of the Great Firewall and lax copyright/patent enforcement to implement protectionism for internet services, which is a unique policy (one that obviously came with massive costs too). This allowed China to develop home grown tech companies which then have the datacenters, capital and talent density to train models. Rest of world didn't do this and wasn't able to build up domestic tech industries competitive with the USA.
There’s no Chinese lab that has been accused by OpenAI or anyone else of distillation. The accusations come from fringe right-wing media that are used to the “China only copies” trope.
Training a model, by the way, is not about money, because many Western tech giants have more money than the CCP can allocate to Chinese labs. Apple, Meta, Amazon, SAP, IBM, and others have access to the same data as OpenAI and should thus be able to come up with a SOTA model in under a year, right?
On lax copyright enforcement, I’d like to point out that it’s actually Western labs that have been taken to court for stealing content.
On matters protectionism,the Great Firewall was the best thing that China did.It prevented them from digital colonization like the rest of the world.
Oh, wow. 1) you're getting awfully defensive here. I didn't say there was some moral failing because Chinese shops distilled models from western ones. It's the smart play. I'm only commenting on how little of a moat first movers have. 2) if you can't admit that deepseek distilled their models from existing work I'm not sure what to tell you. The early models even identified themselves as chatGPT. It's widely known and has substantial evidence. This isn't team sports, you don't need to play defense. We deal with reality here.
They didn't make a big fuss about it but OpenAI have explained that they instituted ID and country verification because there were competitors distilling their models. Of their competitors do you really think Anthropic, Google or Meta were doing that? It's pretty clear who they were talking about.
Chinese labs are mostly (all?) privately funded, as far as I know. Alibaba isn't a SOE. That's why I didn't mention state subsidies, although that might be happening (and certainly is happening w.r.t. access to electricity).
I didn't mention lax copyright/patent enforcement in the context of AI, but rather, the prior years in which China was able to build up local tech firms capable of taking on the US tech firms. It's mostly in the past now, they don't need to do that stuff anymore.
Of course you don't want to wake up one day and you can't access your mails because the US government doesn't like you. .
Huawei had to develop an in-house solution after SAP cut them off.
SAP is a German company that was pressured by the US government (surely with EU blessing - Huawei still has too much control over foreign infrastructure). I guess the lesson is that every country has to replicate software autarchy, and the easiest way for all but the largest countries is through FOSS.
I would not want to use LLMs for such a thing like that. Something like SQL queries or other kind of computer codes would be better. You would have to read the documentation, but it can be specified more precisely and more accurately. If you have a local program that can manage these queries (and then convert them to the remote service's format; a service could provide a file to specify the schema and the estimated cost of different fields) and interact with multiple services (including local files), then that will be better, without having to worry about problems with OpenAI, require as much power that OpenAI uses, more privacy violations than is necessary, etc.
However, it might be useful for people who do want to use that instead.
I don't see how this is a significant upgrade over the many existing hotel-finder tools. At best it slightly augments them as a first pass, but I would still rather look at an actual map of options than trust a stream of generated, ad-augmented text.
The benefit I see is that it meets users where they presumable already are (GPT). As other comments allude to here, it's clear they see themselves as a staple of the user's online experience.
exactly. Booking.com etc can just use OpenAI APIs to enable a similar voice/ chat interface on top of their search, and then the UX is not limited to 'cards'.
The UI 'cards' will naturally becoming ever increasing, and soon you end up back with a full app within ChatGPT or ChatGPT just becomes an app launcher.
The only advantage I can see is if ChatGPT can use data from other apps/ chats in your searches e.g. find me hotels in NYC for my upcoming trip (and it already knows the types of hotels you like, your budget and your dates)
I think the end game is that rather than spitting out text back, the LLM transforms your plaintext request to something processable, and then chooses some relevant widgets to display the results.
I think the future is that models will not be able to answer that well, because sites will move to protect their data/content.
Instead, the model will provide you with a list of (in chat) “apps” that can fulfill your request. SEO becomes AISO (AI Search Optimization). Sites can partly expose data to entice you to choose them.
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