I can feed my biological markers into a set transformer with the time of day, what I'm doing, what I ate, if I'm on-call, and it'll predict my next glucose, heart rate, blood pressure, melatonin, etc state quite well. It's still just a transformer without hormones, blood vessels or glucose metabolism, no matter how well it internally represents metabolic distress markers.
The timing makes it the most likely, not only them but potentially more. Comparatively quick, instant results. "Here's Astra! BTW our internal model is 10x better at math!" It'd be interesting to see academics having giving deeper looks at whatever OpenAI publishes from now on.
Afghanistan: Every NATO member went because of article 5. The Taliban explicitly refused to comply when requested to hand over Bin Laden. This is as clear cut casus belli as it gets. And then Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, Azerbaijan and even Mongolia participated. How are those NATO? How is Mongolia even aligned with the US or under their influence in any way?
Iraq: Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Ukraine, Georgia... And I'm leaving like a dozen non-NATO countries, aligned AND unaligned with the US, that took part in the invasion or post-invasion missions. I don't agree with it, and while there were numerous lies to sell the invasion, equally numerous countries were unhappy about UNSCR 1441 being treated like toilet paper by the UN itself. Moreover, actual major NATO countries like Germany or France were diametrically opposed to the invasion and told the US to take a hike.
When you hold a hammer everything looks like a nail.
You are basically saying that supporting American imperialism is not exclusive to NATO. And I don‘t dispute that.
I also think that history has been far too kind to France’s supposed opposition to the illegal invasion. France stood firmly inside a military alliance who’s members broke international law and disregarded human rights. If France and Germany were serious about their supposed opposition to that war they would have at least threatened to withdraw. But such actions were never even considered. France and Germany were perfectly happy to allow American Imperialist agenda to materialize, even though most other NATO countries took a more active role in the crimes.
> You are basically saying that supporting American imperialism is not exclusive to NATO. And I don‘t dispute that.
No, I'm saying that states are relatively free to agree or disagree with the US, at least until president 47. France faced no consequences, and countries like Nicaragua are on the opposite end of the geopolitcal spectrum with no particular interest in a war on the other side of the world.
Because whether Iraq or Afghanistan bear the historical hallmarks of imperialism is up to debate, especially with Afghanistan with clear casus belli, stated war objectives, and no intention to annex or directly control/govern the territory. The actual number of countries supporting either is a good metric on that; I think Afghanistan war had a much wider support for a reason. Putting both conflicts together is simplistic, if not disingenuous.
>France stood firmly inside a military alliance who’s members broke international law and disregarded human rights.
The USSR stood inside an economic and arguably military alliance with literal Hitler until 41. The USSR fed the Wehrmacht, fueled their tanks, and provided metals for their war machine. Mentioning this since you already mentioned you're on the left side of the spectrum. Can we call the USSR as subservient to Third Reich imperialism?
Breaking an alliance simply because an ally does something you don't agree with, while morally commendable, it is also simplistic. France didn't pull out, like nobody pulled out when France was committing atrocities in Algeria, or when Turkey invaded Cyprus; no Warsaw Pact countries left during Hungary 56, Albania did leave because of Prague 68 but only because of it being the last straw on their already strained relations, like CSTO countries aren't pulling out because of Russian imperialism in Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova. Armenia is trying to pull out only because the CSTO wasn't there when it was needed, that is, when the treaty doesn't address its very own points.
Alliances are born out of self-interest, not out of moral purity or consistency.
> Can we call the USSR as subservient to Third Reich imperialism?
Yes we can, we should, and we do. People on the left (aside from actual Stalinist) do admit that this alliance was bad, kind of like how liberals admit how the British government was wrong to pursue the strategy of appeasement.
What makes this different though is that both Stalin and the British government (under new leadership albeit) reversed course and fought and defeated fascism. We have not seen France nor Germany do this. To the contrary.
> Alliances are born out of self-interest.
This is the world we live in, but we don‘t have to accept it, and we can and should pressure our leaders into making the moral choice. Perhaps a better world is possible, and perhaps blaming our leaders for moral failures is our way to a better world.
For a while Google Workspace didn't enforce the 5TB per user limit and eventually I had 50TB of suspiciously named backups (for real, you should see my DVD collection). Nothing came out of it except for the enforcement and the pain of moving everything elsewhere again.
> And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to compare against, so it was simple to go from one language to another”, but I think that’s selling this entire thing short.
It's not. If you give it a reference implementation, and unless the LLM/agent cheats, you'd get the migration minus undocumented/untested behavior. I've done that with different domain, migrating existing numerical code from Fortran to Rust. When working on the same codebase, agents routinely shit the bed unless given increasingly specific and concrete specs.
It's simply a spectrum between "make an airbnb for ants, make no mistakes" and providing an actual specification (and I consider an implementation to be such). What you don't provide and account for from the beginning will be paid in tokens later. That puts a price label on technical debt, which is interesting in itself, and a perverse incentive for AI companies.
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