Reads bit on dictator-propping via propaganda in Sudan.
Nods. Yep, that sounds like my government alright. And Big Tech. Cries inside.
Veers off to “Ukraine Proxy War” with no reference to ChatGPT as promised in the headline.
Sighs. Closes tab.
OK, while in principle this looks bad…
This is (looking it up) like an experienced engineer’s salary in Peru, in line with some other professions.
It’s reasonable to compensate a president, and for the expectation to not be coming in rich/connected enough to not need a salary. Nor for them to broker power for personal wealth, all as long as other offices and reasonably compensated too.
It avoids perverse incentives, doesn’t seem excessive and TBH is probably a drop in the Peruvian govt’s budget.
Yes, but its clearly a building block of Meta’s LLM training effort, and part of a pattern.
One implication I didn’t mention, and don’t have hard proof I can point to, is garbage in garbage out. Meta let AI slop and human garbage proliferate on Facebook, squandering basically the biggest advantage (besides cash) they have. It’s often speculated that, as it turns out, Twitter and Facebook training data is kinda crap.
…And they’re at it again. Zuckerberg pours cash into corporate trash and get slop back. It’s an internal disaster, like their own divisions.
On the other side, it’s often thought that Chinese models are so good for their size/compute because they’re ahem getting data from the Chinese government, and don’t need to worry about legal issues.
The research community already knows this.
Llama 4 (Meta’s flagship ‘AI’ project) was as bad release. That’s fine. This is interative research; not every experiment works out.
…But it was also a messy and dishonest one.
The release was pushed early and full of bugs. They lied about its performance, especially at long context, going so far as to game Chat Arena with a finetune. Zuckerberg hyped the snot out of it, to the point I saw ads for it on Axios.
Instead of Meta saying they’ll do better, they said they’re reorganizing their divisions to focus on ‘applications’ instead of fundamental research, aka exactly the wrong thing. They’ve hermmoraged good researchers and kept AI bros, far as I can tell from the outside.
Every top LLM trainer has controversies. Just recently Qwen (Alibaba) closed off their top base models just to spite Deepseek, so they can’t distill them. Deepseek is almost certainly training on Google Gemini traces. Google hoards their best research for API models and has chased being sycophantic like ChatGPT. X’s Grok is a joke, and muddied by Musk’s constant lies about, for instance, open sourcing it. Some great outfits like 01ai (the Yi series) faded into the night.
…But I haven’t seen self-destruction quite like Meta’s. Especially considering the ‘f you’ money and GPU farm they have. They’re still pushing interesting research now, but the trajectory is awful.
Yes, we know, you are preaching to the choir here, lemmy.ml.
But I’d rather we not back out of NATO, decouple trade and invade friendly neighbors all while the US continues to screw over far away countries first. At this point, backing out of NATO is not going to help our bad behavior.
After that, we can worry about not screwing with other countries so much, hopefully.
Good move TBH. Just like that, Trump likes NATO again.
There’s an argument for that.
Trump also has incredible political capital. He can literally do no wrong with his base, strongarm congress, and ignore opposition; it gives him paths any other sitting president wouldn’t even dream of.
This is the seductive charm of dictators. They’re really effective at, and generally put in power to clean up messes, or cut through dysfunctional, stagnant political systems.
Paraphrased by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_India–Pakistan_conflict#Analysis
[The Times] reported that India felt frustrated after Donald Trump public claims of mediating a cease-fire, presenting both countries as equals and downplaying the terrorist attack that triggered the conflict, and that India had hoped any U.S. involvement would remain discreet, and Trump’s portrayal of both countries on equal terms was seen by Indian officials as politically sensitive and diplomatically frustrating…
On 21 June, Pakistan announced it would nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing his role in brokering the ceasefire. Pakistan credited Trump’s diplomatic intervention, though India denied any U.S. mediation.
Like it said, seems like India assumed the modest level of mediation would be confidential (clear miscalculus on their part), while Pakistan, err, trumped up the magnitude of the intervention to paint themselves in a better light, possibly because they’re at a military disadvantage, and felt grateful for the help.
Seems like there was some backchannel involvement from many countries (like “Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE and the UK” and indeed the US), but Trump couldn’t help himself and loudly claimed credit before the ceasefire was even announced.
Now India’s annoyed (hence their flat denial).
I like this explanation, it ‘fits’ all the involved characters, including Trump blotting out the sun and killing any nuance to the situation.
Wasn’t his involvement pretty minimal anyway?
Or is that spin from India? Somewhere in between?
Yes, and that was a cruel, stupid move on the US’s part.
…But even if cooperation continued, it still would have given Iran expertise. Further enrichment is not a huge step, especially behind the cover of real civilian power programs, and given the rhetoric the state broadcasts and their neighbor’s hostility, it seems likely.
And that’s fine IMO.
I’m hugely afraid of proliferation, but going to these lengths to worry about it while the rest of the world burns seems ridiculous.
To be fair, Iran wants a nuke down the line, and civilian uranium enrichment is a huge stepping stone. There’s lots of technical alternatives they could pursue if they really just want civilian power.
…And that’s kinda understandable. They have a neighbor that randomly bombs their civilians.
Fuck it, let them have one.
Heck, they should get a tiny bit of old Soviet+US stock in some kind of international deal, so they have credible deterrence with the guaranteed stability+security mechanisms (and oversight?) of their weapons.
(To be more specific, Cold War nukes typically have elaborate tiggers and failsafes meant to stop unauthorized parties from detonating them with any nuclear yield, and the old school Soviet and US systems are pretty good. Better for them to have that than an “insecure” home cooked design they waste money on, like the North Koreans allegedly have, IMO. On top of that, they’d have “known” detonation signatures, so if they ever go off everyone would know it’s Iran (defeating the fear of them “losing” a nuke to another party, or a false flag op against Iran)).
To be fair, Axios didn’t rag on Iran here. They didn’t do any kind of labeling, just stating what happened: Israel bombed a live Iranian news station.
That’s what news is supposed to be. The opinion columns are where terms like ‘Zionist regime’ goes. Same with whatever you’d want to call Iran’s govt, but news is just the event as it comes, maybe with context.
Bombing a live news station, and clarifying that there was no warning, speaks for itself. More context of Israel’s many other crimes would be better, but Axios has a very-brief writing style.
Russia: President, our population is aging! We’re suffering from a brain drain and an isolated, undiversified economy that can’t exploit our vast natural resources in the long term! How should we address this!?
Putin: Rubs chin contemplatively. Why don’t we kill all our young men by invading our culturally similar neighbor, even if it goes bad? Oh, and kidnap and bomb a few children to make it look good on the international stage. Perhaps we should become a Chinese vassal like North Korea… Yes, do that.
Russia: flashbacks intensify
US: Looks on enviously. Looks at vast resources, aging population kept young by immigration, and friendly neighbors. Nods. Can we do that?
US Voters: Hold our beer!
Sorry (but not sorry), the war is indeed awful.
You misinterpreted my, to be fair, vague statement. I meant AA is seemingly a bad source to read about opposition parties like the PKK, because of the obvious conflict of interest.
I mean, AP is a pretty decent source. It’s a nonprofit coop stretching back to 1846 in a country with, err, could-be-worse press freedom history, while AA has been state run since 1920, somewhat akin to VOA, BBC, Al Jazeera or RT I guess.
And yes, I know, AP is still an objectively bad source for specific topics, you don’t have to drill that in. So would whoever shills for the PKK, in some respects. But I’m not playing the game of “they did this and this, they can’t be trusted like them and them!” either. One has to look for conflict of interests everywhere, but it’s also okay to respect the good work long running institutions have done (like AA and this article).
Not really, heh.
There are different degrees though, and different environments for each one, which is what I meant to convey. Like, AA is a better source for Gaza information than, say, Turkish political opposition parties.
Interesting source. It’s basically a nationalized Turkish outlet:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anadolu_Agency
After the Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power, AA and the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) were both restructured to more closely reflect the administration line. According to a 2016 academic article, “these public news producers, especially during the most recent term of the AKP government, have been controlled by officials from a small network close to the party leadership.”
Still, the writing is flat in a good way? I have found that reporting from politically captured sources (say, RT) can be conspicuously good, if it’s on an international subject that aligns with their incentives. For instance, Turkey’s AKP is no fan of Netanyahu, hence AA is motivated to produce (seemingly) original reporting like this.
As I keep saying, America may be a shitshow, but Europe needs to look in the mirror before it happens to you guys too. Far right parties are gaining lots of traction while many assume the EU will be fine, and more war spending is going to exacerbate that.
Fissile material (enriched uranium and plutonium) has a long half-life.
AFAIK tritium is the biggest issue, with a half life of 12.3 years. From what I’ve read, nukes have little feeder tubes to replenish that.
All true. Nevertheless, Russia is in possession of much of that now (specifically the nukes), which is most of what I really implied.
In the future, when we’re transcendent tentacled robofurries doing poly in virtual space, on drugs (think Yivo from Futurama), we will look back in confusion at why so many people hate homosexuality so much. Like… don’t they have other things to worry about?
Or humanity will be all dead, I guess.
And I’m talking about the mega conservatives protesting this; at least the Vatican is baby stepping and trying to minimize their cruelty.