

Something something “the ambiguity of language, curses” 😭
It’s all good my friend


Something something “the ambiguity of language, curses” 😭
It’s all good my friend


It’s a shower thought, ain’t that deep.


Also, being a selfish prick is nothing to be proud of.
Tell me you didn’t read past the title without telling me 😭😭😭


Tell me you didn’t read past the title without telling me 😭😭😭

I take any political win by anyone in our system as a both/and story - both the politician(s) have the skills to meet the moment for public appeal and private industries have preference(s).
Obviously winning without money is ridiculous, but it’s also clear from the historical record that money is not all that’s needed to win; iirc Trump and co spent less than Clinton and co in 2016 & Biden and co spent less than Trump and co in 2020.
I do not really subscribe to the “it’s all about the oil industry” theory, mostly because of the Trump admin announcing a renewal of the Monroe doctrine. Like, oil is part of it because it is a resource, but determination to do imperialism in south america and north America to the point of announcement outright (the “donroe doctrine”) does not solely on oil depend.

There’s something vaguely slimy about framing Chevron as the first beneficiary of Trump’s actions when it has been operating for profit in Venezuela for decades with the agreement of Venezuelas government under Maduro. Neither of them are really pro-Palestine if the line being drawn is anti-Chevron.
Obviously Palestinians deserve way better than the hand dealt to them, no question there.
Edit; and to spell out why this felt kinda slimy to me at first: if:
(1) Chevron was operating in Venezuela with Maduro in charge for years without any real issue with Maduro,
(2) Chevron supports Israel, and
(3) the fight is against those enabling Chevron,
it follows that fighting for Maduro is not directly fighting for Palestine.
Fighting for Maduro would qualify as fighting US imperialism for sure, and therein lies that pesky question about the utility of fighting for someone who had every opportunity to shutdown the imperialist problem (Chevron) on his own by virtue of his political power, and did not.
I fall on the side that it’s fine after thinking it through, but I’m also someone who thinks Democrats are broadly good even if they mostly make for small victories for left-liberal ideologies. Ymmv.


Just wait until you discover I can have multiple and even contradictory reasons for doing any single action. It’s really gonna blow you away


Yeah but France is my favorite South American country


I see through this charade! He just wants to have closer relations with the French!


Yikes.


It can make sense in other ways too imo.


Venezuelan oil MUST remain off of the world markets by and large in order for the current glut of oil production not to be an economic dead end for oil production companies in the US and elsewhere who overcommitted in a world where EV vehicles are proliferating at a rapid pace.
Iirc Venezuelas production is down because it’s facilities can’t process as much oil as at peak without multi-billion dollar updates and repairs.
I think it’s more likely the Trump admin gives US oil companies subsidies to take the oil out despite it being anti-capital and anti-competitive; those two things are his whole MO whenever he thinks capitalism isn’t beneficial for him personally.
But this whole incident strikes me more as a case of projecting US power than seeking petrol dollars specifically. Like, that’s part of it, and not all of it.


I wonder how much rooftop space in Vienna could be cannibalized for solar panels.
Not to be a downer if you’re anti-AI, but you should know a functional, small, 1B parameter model only needs ~85GB of data if the training data set is high quality (the four-year old chinchilla paper set out the 20 to 1 optimization rule for ai training, so it may require even less today).
That’s basically nothing. If a language has over ~130,000 books or an equivalent amount of writing (1,500 books is about a gig in plain ascii), a functional text-based ai model could be built that uses it.
My understanding is there are next to zero languages in existence today that do not have this amount of quality text. Certainly, spoken languages that have no written word are not accessible like this, but most endangered languages with few speakers that have a historical written word could in theory have ai models built that effectively communicate in those languages.
To give you an idea of what this means for less-written languages and a website revolving around them, look at worldcat (which does NOT have anywhere near most of the written text available entirely online for each language listed, it’s JUST a resource for libraries): https://www.oclc.org/en/worldcat/inside-worldcat.html
But this gets even harder for a theoretical website used to avoid an LLM that can read it, because this is all assuming creating an ai model for language from scratch. That is not necessary today because of transfer learning.
Major LLM models with over 100 diverse major languages can be fined-tuned on an insignificant amount of data (even 1GB could work in theory) and produce results like those of a 1B parameter model trained solely on one language. This is because the multi-lingual models developed cross-cultural vector-based understandings of Grammer.
In truth, the only remaining major barriers for any language not understood by fine-tuning an ai model today are both (1) digitization and (2) character recognition. Digitization will vanish as an issue for basically every written language that has a unique script within the next ten years. Character recognition (and more specifically, the economic viability of building the character recognition) will be the only remaining issue.
Ironically, in creating such a website, you will be creating more data for a future potential ai model to use in training. Especially if whatever you write makes the language of greater economic importance.