maybe it's not too late to find out that US was always like this and the fairy tale our parents listened on CIA's RadioFreeEurope was just - a fairy tale for gullible grown-ups ;)
Of course there was always a bit, sometimes a lot, of propaganda everywhere. But at least it was (mostly) for the right causes and ideals. Right now, US is being governed by what I see as the worst possible people, with 0 morals.
Before Trump, at least we had the hypocrisy —like, at least people would pretend to have a moral higher ground. Now there are just completely shameless thugs in charge. They don’t even bother to lie convincingly anymore; just listen to Kristi Noem in interviews, contradicting herself from sentence to sentence without a care in the world. They won’t be held accountable for anything, and they know it.
Eventually, people will grow tired of it and the pendulum will swing the other way.
It’s why the first move of the administration was to replace senior FBI and military leaders with cronies. To hold the pendulum back.
They absolutely know there will eventually be consequences (by default), which is why they work so hard to throw other people under the bus and make a giant confusing mess of things. To try to avoid them.
> The story of the United States is one of genocide, racism, imperialism, and oppression of the working class.
I do not think it is. The story of the US contains all those things. And just as the story of the US contains Abu Ghraib, it also contains functioning courts sending Abu Ghraib perpetrators to jail. You can call it the permanent struggle between good and evil. There is no country in the world without evil. But there is a difference between evil being present and evil dominating. When functioning courts are dismantled, the perpetrators rewarded, you are forbidden to even talk about it, and there is no recourse left, it will be different. People who have not lived through a totalitarian regime sometimes miss that distinction. I also grew up in a communist Czechoslovakia, and I did not idolize the US because I was blind to the bad parts. I idolized it because you had evil, but not evil fully controlling the game. Even now, you can still simply move out of the US. Sure, there might be some bureaucratic hurdles, but you can fly away on a plane - your only way out is not to try to crawl under barbed wire and risk getting shot.
I will be honest - when people say something like “it’s all the same, Russia, the US, all are bad”, I think to myself... óóóh, you have no idea what you are talking about. Unfortunately, the current US is going in that direction, so you might find out. Not that I wish that on anyone.
Only two Abu Ghraib perpetrators were ever sent to jail. One served 6.5 years, the other 1.5 years. I invite everyone to scroll this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... from top to bottom and decide for themself if that should be considered a commensurate punishment.
One may genuinly debate the genocide, racism, imperialism etc. But I can guarantee you that the 'opressed working class' in the US had it 100 times better than the non opressed Eastern European one.
It's so lazy to resort to the false dichotomy of US vs USSR, it doesn't say anything except "It's not as bad as it could've been". Every country in the world can point a finger at someone who had it worse.
And besides, "One may genuinly debate the genocide, racism, imperialism etc" is an essential part of why the working class had a good quality of life in the decades following WW2, particularly white people.
It's easy to build up a good lifestyle when you exploit foreign countries for resources and outsource your labor to poor people across the world because you're not the one paying the bill. But how do you sustain that when those people start demanding the same quality of life that you have? You don't, as we're seeing now.
> It's easy to build up a good lifestyle when you exploit foreign countries for resources and outsource your labor to poor people across the world because you're not the one paying the bill. But how do you sustain that when those people start demanding the same quality of life that you have? You don't, as we're seeing now.
That's quite an oversimplification of the prosperity of the US middle class, particularly given most of the gains happened prior to globalization.
rare here: well written and insightful, I would take this course. I'm curious about why he penalized chatbot mistakes more, at first glance sounds like just discouraging their use but the hole setup indicates genuine desire to let it be a possibility. In my mind the rule should be "same penalty and extra super cookies for catching chatbot mistakes"
I wrote this before to another comment like yours:
I thought this part of penalizing mistakes made with the help of LLMs more was quite ingenious.
If you have this great resource available to you (an LLM) you better show that you read and checked its output. If there's something in the LLM output you do not understand or check to be true, you better remove it.
If you do not use LLMs and just misunderstood something, you will have a (flawed) justification for why you wrote this. If there's something flawed in an LLM answer, the likelihood that you do not have any justification except for "the LLM said so" is quite high and should thus be penalized higher.
One shows a misunderstanding, the other doesn't necessarily show any understanding at all.
Here is my guess:
Usually marks are given for partially correct answers, partially to be less punishing for human error whether caused by stress or other factors, there’s a good chance the student understood the topic. If instead they are using a chat bot, but didn’t catch the mistake themselves, it’s an indication of less understanding and marked accordingly.
Or are dumb hiveminds, having lost their queen due to whatever, and are only caring about satisfying their craving for catfood like in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_9 ?
Take a look at that sea of kids taking the GaoKao to get into Beijing univ and you know the software stack is lost already, it's now only about the fabs (hence the Greenland?).
Either way, not sure protectionism and siphoning money to frontier model owners will help us.
But also by that argument they would have beaten us to frontier model tech as well. Their education system appeared better than ours 20 years ago. We could have a bigger and broader conversation comparing the two systems and China's has a lot of flaws
you are behind the guy with $1M and ahead of the homeless bum with 10 stolen bucks. The elephant in the room is that all three of you are indistinguishably close to each-other when compared to Bezos/Musk/Koch etc ;)
I remember as it was yesterday, many years ago I saw on National Geographic a NGO lady flown thousands of miles to Africa to sit on a boulder and explain (I imagine - the Tv was on mute) the intricacies of her trade. Lower left on the screen there was her name and her job title: "Human Lion Conflict Specialist"
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