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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • 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.




  • I elaborated below, but basically Musk has no idea WTF he’s talking about.

    If I had his “f you” money, I’d at least try a diffusion or bitnet model (and open the weights for others to improve on), and probably 100 other papers I consider low hanging fruit, before this absolutely dumb boomer take.

    He’s such an idiot know it all. It’s so painful whenever he ventures into a field you sorta know.

    But he might just be shouting nonsense on Twitter while X employees actually do something different. Because if they take his orders verbatim they’re going to get crap models, even with all the stupid brute force they have.


  • There’s some nuance.

    Using LLMs to augment data, especially for fine tuning (not training the base model), is a sound method. The Deepseek paper using, for instance, generated reasoning traces is famous for it.

    Another is using LLMs to generate logprobs of text, and train not just on the text itself but on the *probability a frontier LLM sees in every ‘word.’ This is called distillation, though there’s some variation and complication. This is also great because it’s more power/time efficient. Look up Arcee models and their distillation training kit for more on this, and code to see how it works.

    There are some papers on “self play” that can indeed help LLMs.

    But yes, the “dumb” way, aka putting data into a text box and asking an LLM to correct it, is dumb and dumber, because:

    • You introduce some combination of sampling errors and repetition/overused word issues, depending on the sampling settings. There’s no way around this with old autoregressive LLMs.

    • You possibly pollute your dataset with “filler”

    • In Musk’s specific proposition, it doesn’t even fill knowledge gaps the old Grok has.

    In other words, Musk has no idea WTF he’s talking about. It’s the most boomer, AI Bro, not techy ChatGPT user thing he could propose.


  • On the two subs I frequented:

    • /r/thelastairbender is just cultish and shallow now. I abandoned it. But it’s painful for me, as this is like the only sane place left the fandom has any critical mass. /c/thelastairbender is nice, but very quiet.

    • /r/localllama Has… lost its intelligence? Like no one seems to experiment or talk technically anymore, good talk seems to be on github, or shattered across Discords, while the ‘critical mass’ is in the AI Bro black hole of Twitter and Linkedin. I read it, but never post anymore. localllama here is better, but smaller and downvoted to hell.

    Also, I’ve been shadowbanned on like 4 accounts in 3 different IPs/machines, no explanation, no recourse. I never post anything political or even remotely provocative (unless links to Lemmy count) and only visit those two subs, so… Yeah, kinda sick of that.


  • I hate to sound preachy, but this is a good example of “rivals” peacefully meeting.

    So many people I meet IRL seem conditioned to think this person they hate on the internet would be someone they’d shout at like they’re an axe murderer, in the middle of a murder. It’s the example they see. Death threats are, like, normal on Facebook or TV News or whatever they’re into, apparently.

    Again at risk of reaching… this feels like positive masculinity to me.

    And leaders acting like adults.



  • 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)).


  • Whether World ID’s system catches on and succeeds will come down to trust.

    That’s ironic, because the core concept is that you don’t need to “trust” Tools for Humanity with your personal data. You can read the company’s white papers and understand exactly how it all works.

    But humans aren’t wired to think that way. Most people will want to trust the company scanning their irises. That’s a challenge for a company that takes a lot of licks in the press for its futuristic introduction of blockchain into the real world in the form of the metallic orbs.

    Oh, I understand how it works, I understand I don’t want that shit going in and out of some public ledger on their stack.

    I understand I don’t want to boost another crypto pyramid scheme.

    I understand this is associated with Sam Altman, I understand I work with open weights models and (for Lemmy) am a gigantic ML enthusiast, and I understand that, even then, I would not wish one bit of crap that con man sells on my worst enemy, and will shout it to anyone who will listen.




  • “all-in-one API” that will allow agencies to connect their systems to models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic

    This is a huge red flag to me.

    It means:

    • They are ignorant of existing APIs and standards that are exactly this. Uh, MCP or OpenAI API? Which everyone already uses?
    • They have zero interesting in models they can host themselves, or from cheaper providers. Or, heaven forbit, finetune for their own work.
    • They have zero interest in actually useful tools. Like, say, SGLang’s cached hosting and fast fill-in-the-blanks formatting which is perfect for say, processing government forms.

    In other words, it’s just full corporate AI Bro capture. And shitty.

    One of the consequences is that it will be very bad, unfortunately.


  • 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.