AI is mostly a US product, and the one thing smart countries should do right now is to avoid becoming dependent on anything from the US.

My hunch is, don't discount India's IT workforce too soon...

Highly paid software developers are capable of formal methods and other advanced techniques, which would require a far far caster LLM to perform. So the LLM woukd still be more expensive.

Since R1 has good reasoning, but no real breadth, and is open source, the logical thing would be to modify R1 to pre-digest inputs and create an optimised input to 4.1. The logic there would be that people generally won't provide prompts ideally suited to how LLMs work, so LLM processing will always be worse than it could be.

R1 should, however, be ample for preprocessing inputs to make them more LLM-friendly.

1) The above is the definition of the 14 core characteristics of fascism, from "Ur-Fascism" by Umberto Eco, who grew up in Fascist Italy, and is an influential essay on the characteristics of fascist thought (which well predates the new movement).

2) Fascism is not a synonym of Naziism. The Nazis were the the first fascist movement that had the word "socialist" in their name. Several minor ones (like the British Nazi Party) later cribbed it from them, but for example the Italian Fascist movement didn't use it at all when they came to power, the Spanish described their movement (accurately) as syndicalist, etc. In general, Fascist movements were a mix of syndicalism and corporatism, sometimes with a window dressing of socialism to smooth over alliances with powerful oligarchs.

3) The background on the name: Fascism is, as noted by Eco, an overwhelmingly middle class movement, but it likes to dress itself up in the trappings of the working class (the working class, by contrast, has historically been more attracted to socialism, which the middle class sees as a threat to its status). Fascist imagery commonly uses and glorifies the image of "the working man", with hyper-masculinization and motifs promoting the concepts of glory and sacrifice, with the leader presented as the voice of the working man.

But as for Naziism in specific: The Nazi party had its roots as the German Workers Party, which presented itself as a right-wing alternative to the Communist Party (KPD). Hitler joined and soon took control of the party, and in 1920 rebranded it as the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei / NSDAP). The party sought, in the name, to tap into the working class (the country was in a massive economic crisis with large numbers of unemployed people). At the same time, it sought to set itself apart from "socialist parties", such as the Social Democratic Party (SPD), by stressing nationalism. Other parties of the 1930s included the Center Party (Zentrum), aka the Catholics (also their offshoot, the Bavarian People's Party (BVP)); the German National People's Party (DNVP), aka the monarchists (probably the closest party to the Nazis, philosophically); German People's Party (DVP), sort of a middle class-pro business party, sort of your "Never-Trump Republicans" or "Conservadems" (also similar: the German Economic Party (Wirtschaftspartei)); and the German Democratic Party (DDP), aka non-communist pro-democracy leftists.

In the early days of the party - late teens to the early 1920s - the party had a mix of left and right stances. It was from the start rabidly nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish, and in general met all of Eco's characteristics of fascism - but it also had some genuinely socialist-leaning members like Gregor Strasser and his brother Otto, who advocated for nationalization of industry and land reform. However, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler became increasingly dominant. Hitler increasingly marginalized the socialist wing in favour of powerful corporate alliances, and then outright eliminated them in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

The party still retained a number of superficially socialist policies, but, as examples:

x - They created the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront)... but after abolishing all independent unions. This allowed them to keep the appearance of supporting workers rights, while bringing all workers under their control and eliminating their actual ability to negotiate or strike.
x - They created affordable state-sponsored wellness camps and facilities and the like, with an emphasis on the outdoors, esp. to help people detox, etc, but if you're trying to avoid comparisons when you have RFK planning basically the same thing, that's not helping
x - They set a number of price controls and invoked war production acts, but again, that's not really helping the case vs. the current US administration's trade policy either
x - They talked about improving healthcare, housing, land reform, etc, but actually did very little in these regards. Again, not helping.

But overall, they much more strongly aligned with German oligarchs. Before Hitler gained power he started heavily meeting with industrialists. In a meeting in February 1933 he got most of them to "bend the knee" and provide financial support. Oligarchs were generally wary of the Nazis, but more afraid of the communists and socialists. One of Hitler's first acts in power was, as mentioned, to suppress all of the unions, which further cemented his alliance with the oligarchs. The legal code was sculpted into one of "guided capitalism" (what one might today call "Putinism"), where oligarchs were allowed to (and assisted in) amassing wealth, so long as they bent the knee to Nazi goals when it was demanded of them. Cartelization was encouraged, rather than discouraged. Large industrialists benefited massively under the Nazis, receiving large orders, suppression of strikes, access to slave labour (late regime), protection from nationalization, etc. Krupp expanded dramatically. IG Farben expanded dramatically. Major banks expanded dramatically. German automakers expanded dramatically. It was high times for German industrialists, and again, all they had to do was bend the knee. The Quandt family for example, which owns most of BMW today, owes its fortune to largesse from the Nazis.

But again, to reiterate, Naziism was a particular variant of fascism (perhaps notable for its inclusion of an intensely virulent Jewish conspiracy - other fascist movements were hardly pro-Jewish, but most did not include this notion of Jews as a "society-destroying woke mind virus")

See, I mean, at least admit what you are so that we can have an actual conversation.

Fascism isn't "a name to call people"; it's an actual political philosophy. And one can ascribe to it or be opposed to it, but we need to be honest about what said philosophy actually is.

The bottom line is that AI software is, at present, nowhere near where it needs to be to be useful. The approach used has serious flaws and more power won't help that.

Artificial silicone life certainly exists in America. But I don't think it's what you're referring to.

Microsoft today isn't the Microsoft of the 80s and 90s?

I think this rather indicates there may be some lies involved in that claim. This is very much the tactic of Old Microsoft.

** high-quality tweeNing

(That said, I do expect that early on, we'll see Star Wars Prequels-Disease, where some director obsesses over a new tech that's not yet very advanced - such as Lucas with CGI - and overuses it, badly, with little care for quality, and gets audiences sick of it for a while and hypersensitive to when it's badly done. "No no, we can't just suspect that force-lifted apple with a string - we need to use a *CGI apple*!" Substitute in AI for CGI here...)

Oh yeah, those special effects totally hold up today *eyeroll*

Also, Jurassic Park cost $63M to produce, which is $136M today. Only a small fraction of that was computing hardware.

What's weird about these conversations is that everyone polarizes into all-or-nothing. Either AI is going to make movies entirely from scratch, or not a single frame is going to be touched by AI at all. That's not what people like James Cameron are getting at. They want high-quality tweeting. You can provide specific frames, and get those frames exactly how you want them, and then have the AI generate what happened between those frames - and you get many different clips to see different ways the transition could look. And if you like parts of one or another, you can take subframes from those, and tween between them. Your actor is standing on a skyscraper, and an alien missile slams into it, and the skyscraper starts tilting, then crumbles? You take your last filmed shot and photoshop together (with or without aid from AI inpainting) basically a comic book of how you want the attack to go down. You don't actually have to model the building and the missile and all the explosion physics - you just need to show the stages that you want the action to go through.

Also, there's editing and postprocessing. Uh oh, a stage hand was accidentally visible in one scene? Just blip them away. An actor's dialog was changed, but now their lips don't match? Resync to the new dialog. Basically any inconsistencies can be blipped out.

I *totally* get why they want this. And it's not "just write a prompt and get a movie"; it's just to be able to make their work faster and better. Yeah, you could go for "WAY faster, but worse", but then that'd be a box-office flop, because nobody wants to watch a movie where people move through each other or grow extra legs or whatnot. But pairing actual human work with AI lets each leverage each others' strengths and make up for each others' weaknesses.

And on that subject... if you're in a movement that (1) has a "cult of tradition", longing to go back to an imagined former greatness and seeing progress as backtracking; (2) "rejection of modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity (but NOT rejection of industrial potency); (3) "cult of action for action's sake", such as attacks on modern culture and science even when the attacks are self-defeating; (4) "disagreement is treason"; (5) "fear of difference", often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants; (6) "appeal to a frustrated middle class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups; (7) "obsession with a plot", such as a New World Order, Great Replacement Theory, Deep State, etc, (8) "at the same time too strong and too weak" - the enemy as simultaneously a massive oppressor with its claws ruthlessly in everything, yet also sniveling frail snowflakes; (9) "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" - if you oppose some favoured military action by you or your close allies, you too become the enemy to destroy; such regimes also strongly support military armament and expansionist policies (10) "Contempt for the weak", both within and between societies, with a strongly Social-Darwinist view on how the world should run; (11) "Everybody is educated to become a hero" - everyone is expected to sacrifice for the cause, with no sacrifice too great; (12) "Machismo" - holding "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality" (in our time, perhaps no focus could capture this locus better than the topic of trans people, though the new obsession over testosterone levels and "tradwives" certainly competes); (13) "Selective populism" - "The People", conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual, of which the leader holds himself out as the interpreter (though truly he alone dictates it); commonly used to deligitimize democratic institutions who they argue are "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people"; (14) "Newspeak" - catchphrases become mantras and thought-terminating cliches.

x ... ... If that sounds at all like a movement you're in, then yes, you're a fascist.

I have never seen any hint of CSAM on Bluesky. By contrast, Musk has *personally reinstated the accounts* of people who were distributing CSAM, like Dom Lucre.

Lol, if you think Bluesky is an echo chamber on the topic of Adobe's turn to AI... I can't think of any topic that more evenly divides the site's members than AI.

(And for the record, Bluesky is an Umberto Eco chamber, where we discuss semiotics and the latent characteristics of fascist movements ;) )

Gemini struggles. I've repeated the runs on Gemini and can now report it says files were truncated two times in three. After reading in the files, it struggles with prompts - sometimes erroring, sometimes repeating a previous response, sometimes giving part of an answer.

When it gives some sort of answer, further probing shows it failed to consider most of the information available. In fairness, it says it is under development. Handling complex data sources clearly needs work.

But precisely because that is its answer, I must conclude it is not ready yet.

I would be absolutely happy if any of these AI companies were to use the files as a way to stress-test, but I'm sure they've better stress tests already.

Still, it would be very unfair of me to argue a need for improvement if I were to insist on not providing either evidence or a means of testing.