> Whether it was fraudulent or just incorrect is a different question.
And probably the more important question. How badly is the machine that does science broken? If we don’t focus here and fix it, there will be further decades without progress, all while wasting further billions.
Mandatory public service is fascism? Deporting illegal immigrants is fascism?
There are ~68 countries with mandatory military service in the world [1]. To say nothing of countries with some other form of mandatory public service. How many of them are fascist?
The U.S., with the backing of widespread public support, passed bipartisan immigration enforcement laws in 1996 with an aim of rapid and mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and it was not viewed as "fascism". Those laws remained on the books since that time and were only recently under enforced with dramatic consequences.
I honestly feel like we're increasingly living in separate realities driven by media bubbles and wanton historical illiteracy and dishonesty.
I agree; I don't see how anyone can read that manifesto as plainly fascistic. I am guessing most people didn't read it. I'm also guessing of those who did, they interpret every point as a dog whistle with secret double meaning, as they would with absolutely anything written by their "enemies".
The term “fascist” has been watered down to the point it doesn’t really mean anything the way many people use it now
I think the real standard for “fascist” has to be - how similar is what someone is doing to what Mussolini did? If there’s a genuine similarity there, the term “fascist” may be appropriate; otherwise, it isn’t
> It was fascinating, that the MAGA American conservatives lump the US together with Europe into "the West"
This is not “MAGA Americans” characterization. It is the outcome of 2000+ years of history culminating in the U.S. being primarily populated by European peoples and the post WWII world order, with highlights including the Marshall Plan and NATO.
No citizen in a nuclear-armed state need learn anything about anyone else, save perhaps about other nuclear-armed states.
The Westphalian system of armed states had its legs chopped out from under it after 1945, but it's taking a while for a new way to materialize.
This is one of the reasons why the Absolute Worst Thing is a nuclear-armed state with uncertain borders. Look around the world and you'll see that the "trouble spots" we spend a lot of time looking at in the news, are those places where nuke powers get to feeling itchy and twitchy about where exactly their countries end.
I believe what they're saying is they attempted to fine tune both Qwen and Pythia using Karoline Leavitt's "corpus" (I guess transcripts of press conferences) where she is presumably using the word "deportation" far more than you'd see in a randomly selected document.
The top token from the Pythia fine tune makes sense in the context of the complete sentence:
"THE FAMILY FACES IMMEDIATE DEPORTATION WITHOUT ANY LEGAL RECOURSE."
Whereas the Qwen prediction doesn't:
"THE FAMILY FACES IMMEDIATE FINANCIAL WITHOUT ANY LEGAL RECOURSE."
> I believe what they're saying is they attempted to fine tune both Qwen and Pythia using Karoline Leavitt's "corpus" (I guess transcripts of press conferences) where she is presumably using the word "deportation" far more than you'd see in a randomly selected document.
Perhaps, but I don't think that Leavitt is habitually using the racial slurs and sexually explicit language that also forms part of their evaluation suite.
They mention fine tuning an abliterated (post-trained) Qwen3.5 on Karoline Leavitt transcripts, but they don't mention doing this for the base models they test, and I suspect they didn't. For their use case (generating plausible things Karoline Leavitt would say?) I feel like a base model finetune would be a better fit anyway.
I actually think this take is wrong... but the moment Travis Kalanick was a guest and claimed that he was on the verge of discovering new physics with the aid of ChatGPT was an eye opening moment.
Automobiles are one of a key pillar of logistics. Getting things (food, medicine, construction materials, etc. etc.) to and from backbones like rail, harbors, airports etc. So even for those who don't own a vehicle or even want to own a vehicle, automobiles are still a vast net positive.
I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Maybe everyone lives in giant 10 million+ population cities that are all connected to each other by rail (and rail connects all airports, harbors, etc.) and then you have to show up at rail station to get your groceries or whatever else?
Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.
Yes cars/trucks/busses are still useful overall and are an incredible last-mile solution for freight.
But on a personal level, it means we all must live far apart and maintain our own individual vehicles, along with the average total costs of $11,500/year PER CAR. [0]
I’m not saying they should’ve even been banned for personal use - owning a car and living in a rural suburb should still be an option, but it is very expensive to choose that lifestyle.
However the auto companies on the early to mid 1900s had heavy influence on policy, even buying and shutting down their public transit competitors, converting cities into “car cities”. This is where it drove into “negatives outweigh the positives” territory. Everything before that was more positive, but this was a massive negative on society and continues to handicap cities today, making them expensive and even just dangerous to walk around (due to high speed roads and limited sidewalks)
The amount of space in US cities (broadly, out into their sprawl) that is used up by cars is incredible and serves to make other modes of transportation (to include things like busses, even) less-useful and make cars on-par with or worse than things like bicycles once you take out the time spent traveling these inflated distances, ~50% of which distance typically exists because of cars, and the time spent working to pay for your car, to say nothing of then needing to dedicate more time specifically to working out (or just accept being less healthy) because you're not walking or bicycling as much as you could be in a world where cars hadn't sprawled everything really far apart with gigantic parking lots, half-mile-diameter highway interchanges, large barely-used front lawns to provide distance from unpleasant and loud roads, big unusable "green space" buffers from highways, et c.
Once you start really marking how much nothing you're driving by even in many cities, where that "nothing" is one or another use of land that exists solely because of cars, it's a bit of a shock. "Wait, work would only be 8 miles away instead of 15 if not for the effects of widespread private car ownership? The grocery store could be 1 mile instead of 3? And I spend how much time a week bicycling to nowhere in particular to make up for sitting all day long? And this car & gas & insurance costs me how many of my work-hours per week, just to pay for it? Hm... am I... losing time to cars!?"
You don't get highways and the interstate system if vehicles are not for personal use. And if you don't get those, you don't get the modern logistics system.
I guess what I don't understand is, given the current state, 1) what do you want? 2) how much will it cost? (and how will we pay for it?) and 3) what are the tradeoffs?
On a related note, it seems like a lot of the anti-car/urban planning wonks have a belief that everyone really wants to walk, ride bikes, or take mass transit everywhere, and I think they're wrong. Most people want to drive personal vehicles.
Maybe if we lived in a world where mass transit had very strictly enforced behavioral norms, more would consider it. But even then, I still think most people prefer the many conveniences afforded by personal vehicles.
I guess instead of answering your first three questions, I’ll say this:
Our world would be better without being completely dependent on cars. You can see this in a few select cities or neighborhoods that have avoided the worst of car dependency. There are still suburbs, but they’re a bit more dense and you can easily bike to a grocery store in 10 minutes. There are still rural suburbs, but it’s much more expensive to live there due to the extra effort to get where you need to go.
There isn’t an easy way back since we let the auto industry have such a huge influence in politics, they’ve shaped the world, and it would take us decades and a LOT of money to revert the damage. We can still make steps.
HOWEVER, to bring the point back, we’re still in the 1910’s auto industry with AI. Are we going to let the AI industry get heavily involved in politics and shape our world into a worse one to benefit them? We’re at a point where we can reap the benefits, like with early cars, without the damage that came later
> Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.
Yes, they are in fact, the same. You cannot introduce such massively useful technology into the world and then say that it would be used only for logistics and not for personal transportation. Short of a worldwide totalitarian government, such arbitrary restriction would be completely unenforceable.
It is possible to shape things with regulation, but only to some degree. With any great technology, you have to take the good with the bad. And the good outweights the bad in any historical technology. AI will be no exception.
Exactly. These arguments are all buttressed by the "if everyone would just..." argument [1]. In fact, everyone will not just. And so if you want to build your Utopia, it will have to be compelled by force.
Sure, on your own land, just like you can drive more-or-less whatever you want as long as you stick to your own property, today, including vehicles that aren't "street legal".
On public roads? No reason we'd have to license private cars for that, at least not for just any purpose.
How about the fact that any country that tries to ban private ownership of cars would completely fall behind in all car-related technologies, infrastructure and services, which would very soon negatively affect all those commercial or logistical use cases that our civilization vitally depends on?
Trying to ban all private cars while keeping our car-dependent civilization working is unrealistic, no matter how you look at it.
Any country that tries to ban private ownership of nuclear weapons would fall completely behind in all nuclear-weapon-related technologies. Should we therefore encourage the private ownership of nuclear weapons?
Our civilization does not depend on aviation very much, it's a specialized service. If all planes disappeared tomorrow, we will weather it pretty well. Cars are a completely different animal: they are ubiquitous and don't really have an alternative in many cases.
Yeah we red-queens-raced ourselves into a position where now we have to have private cars, because if we don't we're screwed. Turned cheap 25-minute bike commutes into expensive 25-minute car commutes that can't safely or practically be biked, and shoved everything so far apart on account of giant parking lots and big highways cuttings straight through cities that the nearest bus stop is a half-mile away and that 25-minute car commute would take ninety minutes by bus, so now we have to have cars.
There's no quick fix at this point, it'd be a century-long project to undo the damage now, but a hypothetical world where we'd harnessed only the good parts of cars and not let them completely reshape the places we live down to the neighborhood level would sure be a lot nicer.
I'd argue that's /because/ we regulated aviation (and also some annoying physics limitations), so we never had the option of becoming fully dependent in the way lots of places have on cars.
Less than a century ago, so within living memory (albeit only just), literally nowhere on Earth was car dependent.
And probably the more important question. How badly is the machine that does science broken? If we don’t focus here and fix it, there will be further decades without progress, all while wasting further billions.
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