Signifyin(g)Monkey

-Florida conservatives

Lol, I thought it was @legend Yeah, but it does run with the " @unogueen is an AI" theme pretty well. Coincidentally, it makes me wonder if we might soon see LLM-based AIs that are designed to have distinct 'personas'--like versions of ChatGPT that will always answer questions in a self-deprecating, humorous way--or whether that will be unnecessary because existing AIs like ChatGPT will already have become very effective in responding in that style (or any other) if asked to.

Remember that I’ve been on record supporting mass debt forgiveness for both individuals and businesses since 2008, arguing that what has been weighing the economy down has been excessive private debt siphoning their spending power into interest payments, and away from investment and the purchase of goods and services—which is the basis of, um, economic growth. The establishment hacks over at Barron’s now admit I was right, (begrudgingly and indirectly, of course): Op-Ed: Americans Have Quietly Deleveraged. It May Explain the Economy's Resilience. WWW.BARRONS.COM If the Federal Reserve has pulled off a soft landing, it may be due to shifts in the composition of U.S. debt since 2008, writes Larry Hatheway. Basically the COVID stimulus carried out my policy in a clunky, inefficient way. Make me benevolent dictator for life, people. (Oh and none of my ideas were borrowed from heterodox economists of unappreciated genius, I swear)

No, really. A 20-year vet quit the newly-revived ‘Florida State Guard’ because it was too much like a private DeSantis militia. Guess what its stated goals are? And in case you thought I was exaggerating—no, really, these troops *literally* only answer to DeSantis.

I’m definitely open to a non-mainstream Democratic candidate, and I think there’s a lot of voters disaffected with both parties (especially members of the ‘old left’ that don’t particularly like the cultural left) that such a candidate could animate, but a cartoonish crank like RFK Jr. is not it.

I heard a friend of a friend of mine brag the other day about how he’d nearly doubled his income by job hopping since 2020, and had recruiters eating out of his hand; then he offhandedly claimed Biden was destroying the economy. Politics, amirite? To be fair my more liberal colleagues got into the habit of trying to claim unemployment wasn’t low during the pre-pandemic Trump years, when it clearly was. I think the idea that most people vote with their pocketbook is pretty much dead. Now most people think their pocketbook is either half-empty or half-full depending on whether the person they voted for is in office.

Yes, and this has been tried before. There is lots of debate on why it is or is not possible to sustain in the long term. By the 20th century the consensus amongst economists was that it would inevitably collapse due to Gresham's Law. But the consensus amongst economists has a history of being very, very wrong. I personally think it could work, and maybe work even better than a gold standard, but you'd need to have a very adept financial and fiscal authority to manage it. Dude, it's a thread about a BRICS currency, how else am I supposed to get people other than econ nerds to click on it? Anyway, the idea is that once there is a currency other than the dollar out there that a critical mass of countries choose to save in and use to settle trade balances between themselves, they will stop buying treasury bills to finance international trade, and as their primary form of savings. Then when the US wants to buy something from, say, China, the BRICS bank could say "sorry, we don't take dollars anymore, you gotta pay in our currency." This would reduce US hegemony in other ways, most acutely by preventing the US from using its balance of payments deficits to to finance its spending abroad (i.e., its war spending), forcing it to reduce its political and military reach. I'm sure the question that immediately comes to mind is "Wasn't the euro supposed to do that? Why hasn't it?" And the short answer is that it actually did--EU countries have significantly reduced their US treasury holdings since the introduction of the euro. The problem is that A.) the artificial constraints put on the Euro by its rather neoliberal engineers has prevented it from being flexible enough to sufficiently expand its supply to a degree that it can finance the entirety of the Euro area's savings and international trade without relying on dollars, B.) the fact that it rests solely on a political agreement, rather than any 'real' source of monetary power, has prevented its wider adoption abroad, and so reduced its capacity to break free of the fully global dollar system. Also, C.) the US has so far effectively offset the fall in demand for treasuries by Europe by getting countries like Japan and other American allies in East Asia to buy them in increasingly massive amounts. They do this largely because they want to have huge holdings of dollars so they can intervene in financial markets to stabilize exchange rates, not only during times of crisis but in boom times, when increased imports would threaten to depreciate their currencies unless they sell reserves against the dollar. But that's not sustainable, as the East Asian financial crisis showed. And that's part of the idea here for the BRICS--if they can trade in common currency backed by gold, they can use gold reserves to stabilize their exchange rates rather than dollars. That would dislodge the US as the center of financial activity for their economies, and end the leverage the US has over them, and any consequent ability to push them around politically minus costly military intervention. Like I said--nice idea, but as others have already pointed out, politically and financially integrating the BRICS into a cohesive bloc that can operate independently of American finance is a tall order given the pretty large differences between many of their economies. Plus you need international financial institutions to back you up, otherwise you'll be bullied back into dollar submission by the IMF and the World Bank. I think the BRICS New Development Bank is an attempt to create an IMF/World Bank rival for this purpose. Again...lovely concept, but a tall order. As tall as the American military-industrial complex it'll be combatting. When a fiction is believed widely enough, it can have the same effect as truth. But the underlying non-fictional truth tends to re-exert itself over time.

Okay, everything in the thread title after the comma is a total exaggeration, and this is coming from a fairly unsavory source (the news desk at RT, Russia's state-supported tv channel) but this could still be a fairly significant development if true. Yes, the BRICS countries have been advertising for awhile that they were going to float a new common currency for them to use amongst each other for international trade, but up until now the bets were all on it being similar to the Euro--i.e., having nothing backing it except a political agreement. Having it backed by their gold reserves, on the other hand, would give it a level of seriousness and economic heft that it wouldn't have if the BRICS were just getting together to sign Maastricht 2.0. That's because there hasn't really been a significant multinational trading currency backed by gold since, um...the dollar under Bretton Woods. So I'd actually say that the chance for something like this to change the global monetary order is fairly non-trivial if the BRICS can effectively defend the gold peg. And therein lies the big question. Having your currency backed by gold reserves means that running a balance of payments deficit essentially bleeds those reserves into surplus countries. You have to actually achieve a decent level of economic integration to get the arrangement to work, and you have to be very disciplined with your trade balances; if you're not, and you run deficits against countries outside the regional bloc, all your gold ends up in the hands of foreign powers. And if you have unbalanced trade inside the currency area, you wind up with all the gold in the hands of a single internal super-creditor, which leads to political dysfunction. (ask Germany what that dysfunction looks like, it knows a lot about it) I definitely think it could happen, but...when I look at the BRICS economies, what I see doesn't exactly scream 'balance' and 'discipline'.

Shades of WW1. Initial belligerents: ”This’ll be over quick. Lightning warfare, a little shoot-out in the trenches, poof, we’re done. The littler guy has no chance.” [over four years later, half the planet involved, Europe in ashes] ”…okay, maybe we were just a *touch* optimistic…”

Except if you have the kind of insider information that traders used to stake their careers on in the days of yore, and you're on a physical trading floor in a garish jacket making conventional trades rather than at home in your underpants contributing to a Big Data financial scheme via your laptop, you're doing it wrong.

Nope, still not good enough. Next sprint, revise the implementation of the softmax function, tweak the tokenizer.

Each time I think we’ve reached peak political absurdity, American politics feels obliged to kick it up a notch.

If Trump wins in 2024 and decides he actually wants to help NATO (presumably for reasons relating solely to his ego) expect that number to shoot up to 98%.

True story, a former coworker of mine who was convinced he had been infertile since he turned forty discovered at age 65 that he had a twenty year old son.

First AI-generated animated political satire? I feel like ChatGPT had a hand in the making of this film. (Or at least the plot)

It's hard to know, both sides are trying to project an image of strength. IMO, a weird aspect of warfare in the age of ascendant digital networks is that to some degree perception is reality. Being perceived in the mediasphere as 'losing' will negatively affect morale, and thus have concrete negative effects on the ground. The media outlets and spokespeople of both Ukraine (and to a large degree NATO-aligned countries) and Russia have all the incentive in the world to paint as rosy a picture of their efforts and as dark a picture of the other's efforts as possible, and accuse the other of spreading 'disinfo' when the details of their pictures conflict. This feedback loop between media perception and actual battlefield realities has obviously been present in prior eras of war, but because of the internet's ability to beam news straight to your smart-phone in real time, I feel like it's been intensified and sped up to a degree where it can be hard to distinguish between the truth of a war campaign and the strategically biased representation of that truth. It's almost like military facts exist in a kind of quantum state of uncertainty that can't be directly apprehended, since any attempt at apprehension requires using tools that are not impartial in their observations, and affect the reality they observe.

At least now the MAGA wing of the Republican party will stop complaining that the security state only targets Trump and the GOP. (I could put a '/s' at the end but is it really at all possible to take the preceding sentence seriously?)

Yeah this is my conclusion as well, surveying everything that’s happened so far. I doubt the ‘protests’ will really accomplish anything concrete, but I can definitely see Reddit’s investors blaming Huffman for giving the company an unnecessary public black eye here. A halfway competent executive could have handled this in a way that addressed the core business concern—‘we can no longer allow third party apps to use our data for free’—without alienating literally everybody and attracting bad publicity. Just as problematically, from his interviews alone, it’s fairly clear Huffman is responding to this situation in an emotional (and rather bullheaded) way, not with the detached, calculating mindset an investor expects from corporate leadership. As an aside, the whole situation makes me *really* want to know Reddit’s internal costs. If the new API prices aren’t just absurd miscalculations about what the market will bear and actually reflect what it costs to keep the lights on, I don’t see how the company will ever be profitable.

Not sure I agree with you on this particular point, but this reminded me that several of my coworkers who were formerly employed by gun manufacturers confirm that manufacturers actually think it’s bad for business when we have a Republican president in office, because gun sales go way up under Democrats, owing to the ‘Democrat=gun control’ association. I don’t personally think that’s a good argument against gun control in and of itself, but it is a dynamic to consider, regardless of where you fall on the issue.

To make an imperfect Chinese analogy, Bush Jr. was bad in the way Mao’s Great Famine was bad. Trump was bad in the way Mao’s Cultural Revolution was bad. In both cases, Maoism (the Reagan paradigm) was the source of the badness, even though it nonetheless helped Mao win China’s independence. (i.e., neoliberalism/neoconservatism probably helped the US and the West win the Cold War, but set the stage for its long-term decline by helping to establish the preconditions for the ‘08 GFC and the disaster of the Afghanistan/Iraq misadventures, which marked the effective end of unipolar American hegemony, and paved the way for Trump and his ability to whip the now-discontented populace into a Cultural Revolution-style frenzy)

Yeah, I think he's talking about the concrete implementations. I'd wager he'd be skeptical that you can effectively apply AI to any system involving exchanges between human beings without continuous input from human beings, even if it utilizes unsupervised learning. Although I've heard him concede that it's possible if you're dealing with a closed system in a controlled environment, like a game with a limited move-set. (But most of the important systems that operate within society are open, evolving ones, in uncontrolled environments.) Actually, that idea is one reason why I find the history of AI-generated language translation really interesting. According to the accounts I've read, the early attempts to achieve it involved trying to build the most accurate data-model of human language as possible, and it was assumed once that was done you could translate text/speech between one language and another without using large data sets. But it never really worked until researchers shifted to using large data-sets of actual translations run through correlative statistical algorithms, LLM-style. Do you find, working within the field, that the original idea of finding the original 'golden key' of the pristine Chomskyan data model for language still alive? Are there those who think Big Data techniques will eventually be made obsolete in this respect? Not coincidentally, he has a fairly iconoclastic reading of the Turing Test. He has argued that there's no way to know whether a machine passes the Turing test because it has become smart enough to convince the observer that it is a human being, or whether it is because the observer has become dumber--dumb enough to believe the machine is human, when it clearly isn't. He frames the text that articulated the test itself as partially a reprimand or cry for help from Turing towards the institutions and people he worked for, driven by the way he was treated for his homosexuality, i.e., "if you're dumb enough to forcibly drug me with hormones for being gay after I basically helped you win WWII maybe you're dumb enough to believe machines and people could be the same". It's a fascinating interpretation, but I'm guessing not a popular one.

On the last point, I always thought it was more of a reframing rather than a dismissal. The claim is that intelligent systems with human-like cognitive abilities are the product of processing input taken from human sources, and thinking of them as freestanding, autonomous minds (or 'intelligences') hides the role these human sources (who are freestanding, autonomous minds) play. I think it comes out of his 'humanist' view of intelligence and the mind in general. While he has a fairly nuanced view on the nature of human consciousness (which I think he kind of implies is a necessary predicate for true 'human intelligence' in his arguments), he strikes me ultimately as someone who views it as something unique to humans that a digital machine probably isn't capable of replicating. (particularly the aspect of subjective experience or 'interiority') That's kind of my interpretation, though, he never says that explicitly. He touches on his views here--and notes the irony of being a big fan of Daniel Dennet, who holds very different opinions from him:

Meant to post this awhile back in this thread. When it comes to the AI debate, Jaron Lanier is one of the most formidable minds on the subject and whether you agree with his positions or not, you'd be intellectually lazy not to reckon with his arguments. Formerly they have been relegated to his books (Who Owns the Future and Dawn of the New Everything are good ones to start with) but he published a New Yorker article touching on some of his main themes that is a must-read if you're interested in the subject: There Is No A.I. | The New Yorker WWW.NEWYORKER.COM There are ways of controlling the new technology—but first we have to stop mythologizing it.

As sad as that is, I’m actually more sad right now that Cormac McCarthy is dead ‘Blood Meridian’ is one of my favorite books

Remember jigs’ whole “Fox News’s opinion shows are biased but its regular reporting isn’t, unlike CNN” shpiel? If you don’t, be glad.