The point being that sometimes things that look “clever” if you only look at the obvious primary effects are not at all clever when you also consider secondary effects.

If only when it comes to “ease of eavesdropping” it might very well be in the best long term interest of the Israeli Security Services that the rest of the World keeps on acquiring Made In Europe and Made In US devices which this action will likely impact (one thing are accusations of “backdoors” in certain devices a whole different thing is seeing on TV a mass attack were a batch of devices all made in a nation allied with Israel contained explosives and that were detonated in all manner of arbitrary places hitting thousands of arbitrary people).

Then there’s the possible impact on Israeli Allies’ exports of electronics given these pagers were specifically manufactured in Hungary (a very strong ally of Israel) by a company licensing the brand name - is it really a good idea for anybody in a political, state or security position in any nation not allied with Israel to buy any device with remote access capabilities from made in any nation allied with Israel or with a significant part of the supply chain passing thorugh one of those nations. If they’re willing to have explosives put in them and detonated in the middle of crowds of civilians, what else are they willing to do - it’s the same reason why buying Security Software from an Israeli company is extremelly stupid for any company (even in allied nations) only now Electronics is also included, there’s very obvious proof that they will do just about anything (rather than merelly an unproven risk of industrial espionage) and the risk also includes things sourced from nations allied with Israel.

Time will tell just how big those two classes of secondary and tertiary effects really are.

Mind you, as I see it anybody who gets in bed with ethno-Fascists like the Zionists deserves all the damage that comes from them having no limits whatsoever to what they’ll do.

They were on TV over here (Portugal) doing a press conference were they explained the devices were made in Hungary by a company which licensed the brand name from them (a Taiwanese company) so the manufacturer’s name (which I totally forgot) is definitely out.

The obvious solution is to just procure their equipment from China only as they are naturally not allied with Israel if only because geostrategicaly they’d adversaries of the top Israeli ally, the US.

Given the indiscriminate nature of this attack this might imply purchasing decisions all over the World from much more than merely “members of groups deemed terrorist by the US”.

Specifically in Hungary, same country that has been voting with Israel in the UN and also has a Fascist government.

It sure makes manufacturing involving explosives much more easily to go ahead if the local government has approved of it.

I’m curious what this will do to the “Made In EU” brand in the rest of the World.

There are several reports that the devices were made with the explosives built-in.

According to the spokesperson of the Taiwanese brand in a press conference, those were all devices produced by a Hungarian licensee of the brand.

Hungary, you know, been voting with Israel in the UN and also has a Fascist government which is massivelly racist against Arabs.

Kind makes sense that those things were manufactured in a country very friendly of Israel and with their authorization, already with the explosis built-in.

The interesting second and third level effects to consider of this are around the impact on things like Globalization (if having to start paying attention to the alliances of the countries the stuff you buy comes from the places which are part of a supply chain stop being irrelevant) and even brand licensing (that Taiwanese company will have their name pop-up associated with this in every single internet search from now on)

Also curious about what will this to to “Made in EU” - Hungary might just have screwed the rest of us much more than ever before.

It depends on the Western country - some are much worse than others when it comes to the whole practice of defining people’s worth mainly from their race.

Some Western nations (maybe most of them in Europe) do tend to see value in all human live, Arab or otherwise, but many to indeed see no value in Arab life.

If I was to point a finger at the worst in Europe I would say Britain, Hungary, Austria and Germany.

Well, there are three points on that:

• Business investment doesn’t need money from the rich, it just needs any money, resources and manpower. Shareholding means lots of non-rich can supply the money (it’s not the rich that are needed, it’s the money) and structures like Cooperatives mean that many businesses can be made by people just pooling their work and resources. Theoretically at least mass Shareholding should make for a more robust business environments because many people investing should have a lot more variety (hence making the whole more resilience to the kind of unforeseen changes that cause Crashes) in terms of what’s invested in and the investment objectives than just a few people.
• The money being too concentrated together with the current Ownership Laws (mainly Land Ownership, though in some areas also Intelectual Property) actually crowd out most news businesses because of how expensive it is to launch most business ventures, not just directly but even in terms of the founders themselves being able to afford being out of work whilst they launch a business. Notice how even in big cities but especially in smaller cities and even towns, stores are closing and those spaces remain closed for months or even years. The money and property concentrated in fewer hand has the leverage to demand huge rents from the rest of Society to be able to use those thing they’ve locked-in through ownership and that’s killing lots of business at the start stage and even stopping the business ideas themselves from ever being put in practice. It’s “funny” that the rich having all the money creates a situation were so much money is needed to launch a successful business that it can only work with funding from the rich - nobody is going to create, say, a large restaurant chain from the humble beginning of a single venue in a small town when the necessary realestate to expand or even just start costs many times more to rent or buy than it did back in the 60s and 70s when so many of todays big name such chains started just like that.
• The actual value of more investment depends on were the bottleneck is in the Economy: supply side or consumer side. There is no point in adding more businesses (i.e. Production) if there’s a lack of demand (i.e. Consumption) because median incomes are too low. If you look around (just notice companies nickel & diming customers) we currently have a lack of demand, not of supply, so money going into investment just makes the problem worse whilst money going (via better wages) into consumption would help.

Thanks for that very complete view of things.

Things are quite different since I last was doing hiring, which was pre-COVID.

Yeah, my experience leading a remoted team in India also showed the importance of cultural awareness and good requirements: I ultimately got into the habit of, after the big meeting with the boss were all the work was given to the various teams, get my guys individually on the phone (so that they feared not “losing face”) and carefully coach out of them any questions or doubts since otherwise they wouldn’t voice them and just end up implementing something they misunderstood or which wasn’t explained correctly and indeed they also needed very detailed requirements which was a problem because the senior guys on the other side who ended up having to write said requirements could pretty much have done the job themselves in that time.

This was a big Investment Bank and some top level manager in NY decided to create a division in India to outsource work to, but it definitely didn’t get the cream of the crop over there and the career structuring there was so shit that the few good techies we got would quickly end up as (bad) managers - their pay scales followed the stupid idea that “nobody can be paid more than management” so good mid level techies had to become junior managers to earn more, and they invariably were crap as managers.

Well, I was just an immigrant in the place for a bit over a decade.

Still, having seen first hand the long term consequences of the purest expression of her and Reagan’s ideology (that shit also got copied all over Europe, including my own country, but in a diluted form), pure hate for Thatcher was one of those things I quickly learned from Common Britons and took into my heart.

The West has been fucked by that shit but I got the impression that the US and the UK got especially fucked and endured (and still are enduring) a much larger fall because of it.

In the UK, when Thatcher (who was their version of Reagan) died, the lyrics “Ding, dong, the witch is dead” from the Wizard Of Oz suddenly became very popular.

Evil + Hypocrisy always beats mere Evil.

Having spent most of my career working as a senior contractor, which often meant landing on code bases with 3+ layers of fuckups, I can only imagine how painful it will be to end up having to clean and fix AI generated code, since that doesn’t even have a consistent coding style or pattern of design errors and bugs.

More specifically: the same kind of decision makers are behind both.

One of the first things they teach you in Experimental Physics is that you can’t derive a curve from just 2 data points.

You can just as easilly fit an exponential growth curve to 2 points like that one 20% above the other, as you can a a sinusoidal curve, a linear one, an inverse square curve (that actually grows to a peak and then eventually goes down again) and any of the many curves were growth has ever diminishing returns and can’t go beyond a certain point (literally “with a limit”)

I think the point that many are making is that LLM growth in precision is the latter kind of curve: growing but ever slower and tending to a limit which is much less than 100%. It might even be like more like the inverse square one (in that it might actually go down) if the output of LLM models ends up poluting the training sets of the models, which is a real risk.

You showing that there was some growth between two versions of GPT (so, 2 data points, a before and an after) doesn’t disprove this hypotesis. I doesn’t prove it either: as I said, 2 data points aren’t enough to derive a curve.

If you do look at the past growth of precision for LLMs, whilst improvement is still happening, the rate of improvement has been going down, which does support the idea that there is a limit to how good they can get.

Yeah, you’re mostly right: Why bycicles stay upright.

There’s some gyroscopic effect, but per that article it’s not the main reason.

To quote the greate Mahatma Gandhi: “Yes”

Same principle as a gyroscope: a turning wheel will tend to stay perpendicular or parallel to the direction of the gravity vector because if it starts tilting away from such orientation there’s a force that pushes it back.

Also works better with bigger wheels (if I remember it correctly the effect is related to spinning momentum).

I was pretty surprised when learning Physics and they show us how to derive the formula for that (which I totally forgot since that was over 3 decades ago).

Edit: Actually the gyroscopic effetc is just a part of it. See this article

A recent study publish in the Lancet - a medical journal - estimated the deaths in Palestine to already be over 180k.

This was a few months ago.

Just because they share the same religion doesn’t mean they’re the same kind of people.

That bunch in Israel have even accused a Holocaust Survivor of being an anti-semite for criticizing Israel, and most modern Israelis did not came from Western Europe. Most of them they share no other characteristic with the victims of the Holocaust than religious affiliation, certainly not being against racism or having other modern humanist values.

“They made me do it” has been the main axis of Israeli Propaganda since the start and that’s just a variant of that.

How about this alternative explanation: they’re stealing Palestinian land, want to ultimatelly steal all Palestinian land, are led by Sociopaths and Psychopaths and have an extremely racist society anchored on the kind of ethnic superiority ideas that would make Klanners blush, so they were always going to do something like this sooner or later to get rid of the rest of Palestinians and get the rest of their land and do it in the most inhuman ways because a large part, maybe even most, of Israeli society see themselves as “the chosen people”, a superior ethnicity and what the previous famous group of ethno-Fascists would call übermenschen, whilst they see Palestinians as lesser people, “human animals”, untermenschen.

This is the kind of mass murdering Western nations used to do back in the days of Colonialism. It’s only shocking for us nowadays because we’ve evolved as societies and adopted Humanist values (though by their support of Israel you can see that many politicians in several countries and even a large fraction of people have in fact not evolved). Israel does in fact have Western Values, it’s just they’re the White Colonialist Values that many European nations had back in the 19th Century, not 21st Century Western Values.