You’re missing the point entirely. Biological systems are governed by the laws thermodynamics.

I’m not missing anything. I’m simply explaining to you that the fitness function for living organisms is far more complex than simply striving for efficiency. I understand perfectly well how entropy and thermodynamics work.

The brain has a disproportionately high metabolism relative to other organs in the human body. To argue it’s largely a redundant structure like the kidneys or liver you need real evidence.

There is plenty of real evidence. I’ve literally provided you evidence of a person with most of their brain missing who has led a normal life. Another obvious example is people who lose half their brain in accidents and can continue to live normal lives with a single hemisphere. More evidence comes from birds like corvids who exhibit high levels of intelligence and problem solving that’s comparable to primates. Since they have an additional requirement of being able to fly, there is a selection pressure to optimize the system further. Just because you’re completely ignorant on the topic you’re attempting to debate here doesn’t mean that evidence doesn’t exist.

You linked a fucking blog post written by a science fiction author not a peer reviewed scientific paper. And yes I did read it. Is your ego so large that you can’t possible conceive of someone coming to a different conclusion when faced with the same “evidence”?

I linked you a blog post by a biologist discussing a paper. This is a very well known case that’s in no way controversial. The fact that you’re acting as if it just just further shows that you have no business having this discussion. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.3679117/scientists-research-man-missing-90-of-his-brain-who-leads-a-normal-life-1.3679125

Big “I know you are but what am I” energy. lol

about the level of discourse I’ve come to expect from you lol

One of the most hilarious things of late has been libs, who see themselves as a paragon of rationality, expose that they’re just a different flavor of qAnon.

That’s right history starts on February 2022, nothing happened before then. 🤡

Pretty sure a large chunk of Americans think that Russia is still communist.

lol fixed

I imagine that technical challenge is the whole point as it’s a demonstration that China is capable of building this sort of technology. China exports their technology and infrastructure to other countries in BRICS and BRI, and many of them don’t have any HSR infrastructure at all. China will be able to showcase how this infrastructure works in practice, and offer something no other country can.

The sources I use are mainstream western sources. Just because you don’t like what these sources show does make them invalid.

I disagree with the notion that human rights are a problem in China compared to the west. First of all, we have to clarify what we mean by rights here. The types of rights people in the west enjoy are poorly defined and largely ephemeral such as the right to free speech. This is no more than jester’s privilege where you’re allowed to scream into the void, but you typically cannot translate that into any tangible action.

For example, people in the US have the right to vote and to elect politicians. Yet, the tangible outcome is that the political system represents the interests of the ruling capital owning class and not the voting majority. As Eric Li put it, the biggest difference in the political systems between China and US is that in America, you can change the political parties but you can’t change policies. In China, you can’t change the party but you can change policies.

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

The US also practices modern day slavery which violates fundamental human rights even as the west defines them.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is another great example. Majority of western public opposes this atrocity, but the regimes they live under actively facilitate the continuation of the atrocities. Here, not only the rights of the citizens of the west are nowhere to be found, but it’s also the rights of people living outside the west that are being trampled. The west is responsible for destruction of many countries in the past decades, and by extension the rights of millions of people who lived in them.

Furthermore, the western conception of human rights focuses on positive freedoms while largely ignoring the importance of negative freedoms, such as freedom from poverty and the fear of illness or a lack of financial security in old age. These are tangible, real-world freedoms that directly impact our quality of life. This brings us to the subject of liberal ideology and the fact that it is directly at odds with meaningful human rights.

Liberalism consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on wholesome ideas such as individual freedoms and democracy. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.

As a result, liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which contradicts the promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, the talk of freedom and democracy ends up being nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.

On the other hand, people in China enjoy genuine human rights, like right to housing, education, and healthcare. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

In fact, people in China enjoy high levels of social mobility in general https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html

Student debt in China is virtually non-existent because education is not run for profit. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2016/08/29/why-china-doesnt-have-a-student-debt-problem/

China massively invests in public infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/12/05/china-used-more-concrete-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-used-in-the-entire-20th-century-infographic/

China also built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade https://www.railjournal.com/passenger/high-speed/ten-years-27000km-china-celebrates-a-decade-of-high-speed/

All these things translate into tangible freedoms allowing people to live their lives to the fullest. Freedom can be seen as the measure of personal agency an individual enjoys within the framework of society. A good measure of whether people genuinely feel free is to look at what people of the country have to say on the subject. Even as mainstream western media openly admits, people in China overwhelmingly see their system as being democratic, and the government enjoys broad public trust and support.

• https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
• https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
• https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
• https://web.archive.org/web/20230511041927/https://6389062.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6389062/Canva images/Democracy Perception Index 2023.pdf
• https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-say-people-98686
• https://web.archive.org/web/20201229132410/https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/

Looks like it’s just the prototype at the moment. A couple of links with some details here

• https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3317905/buckle-china-unveils-maglev-marvel-redefining-future-high-speed-rail
• https://www.newsweek.com/china-maglev-high-speed-rail-2097232

For sure, technology is self reinforcing in nature. All the investments China made work together to allow them to build bigger and better things going forward.

Meanwhile, there’s little indication that Chinese system is prone to insane leaders. If you look at the history of leadership in PRC, it’s been competent and very much sane throughout its history. A big reason for it is that there’s an arduous and highly competitive selection process for moving up in the system. A random yahoo with a bunch of money can’t just become the president of China.

Consider the road Xi had to walk to get where he is today. Whether you come from a grassroots family or a political family, you have to go through every step. Only in this way, you can reach the top of power.

To get started, you have to own a college degree, at least for most Chinese govt officials. You have to take the national civil service examination and be admitted. In 2019, 92000 people took the exam and 14537 were admitted, with the admission rate of 1.58%.

The ruling party in China is the CPC. In addition, there are 8 other parties. You have to join one of them. If your ideal is to become the supreme leader of China then you join the CPC. You will be one of the 90 million CPC members. They are all your competitors.

Now, you’ve become a grassroots official. Your administrative level is “staff”, while President Xi’s administrative level is “national level principal”. There are 10 levels of gap between you and President Xi. Each level requires several years and multiple examinations.

In China, “Organization Department” at all levels are responsible for the management of civil servants. Every civil servant has to take part in the grade assessment every year. The assessment is usually conducted by your colleagues, subordinates and superiors by voting. The result of the assessment is related to your future.

If you work hard and are lucky enough, you will become the highest official in a district or county. As President Xi did in 1983, he became the highest official in Zhengding County. You have to own the experience to manage hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.

Next, you have to become a city official in charge of industry or agriculture or education or commerce. Then, you become a mayor. It will take you another few years. In 1990, President Xi became the top leader of Fuzhou City, Fujian Province.

Now, if you want to become a governor then you need to repeat your previous work. The difference is that your responsibilities are greater and your work is more onerous. In 2000, President Xi became governor of Fujian Province.

After becoming the governor of a relatively small province, you have to be the governor of a relatively large province. Or you can go to border areas, such as Xinjiang or Tibet. President Hu Jintao, the former leader of China, was once the governor of Tibet.

The Political Bureau is one of the central leading bodies of the CPC. You must be a member of it. Members of the Political Bureau are elected by the plenary session of the Central Committee. It’s your next goal.

Deputies to the National People’s Congress (NPC) are members of the highest organ of state power in China and are elected in accordance with law. You also have to be one of the NPCs.

If you can become a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, it usually consists of seven or nine people, which means that you have entered the core of China’s state power. In 2007, President Xi was elected.

Similarly, different standing committees are responsible for managing different areas of the country. Through fierce competition, you finally become the top leader of China. In 2012, President Xi succeeded. He still spent 40 years on this road!

The above is what anyone who has ambitions to become China’s top leader has to go through. It is based on a strict selection system and the election of deputies to the people’s Congress at all levels.

It makes sense, China started behind technologically and the only way they could catch up was by having a higher rate of technological progress. Now that they’ve caught up, faster rate of advancement necessarily means they’re starting to surpass the west.

The question here is what makes art, is it the effort that goes into the process of producing it or the vision the artist has that matters. I’d argue that what matters is in the eye of the beholder. If you look at an image and it evokes an emotion or a feeling within you, then it’s meaningful to you. How the image was produced hardly matter in my opinion.

I bet MechaHitler was what really cinched the deal.

I can tell you for a fact that they can. However, even managing boilerplate and repetitive code is a huge benefit. Furthermore, these tools are great at combing through code bases and helping you find where you need to make changes in code. If you haven’t actually used these tools in a real project yourself then you don’t really know what they’re capable of.

Indeed, self hosing has to be the way forward.

It depends on the task and the specific LLM. My experience is that they can do a lot of things effectively nowadays, and they’re improving rapidly.

Burial at Sea/Hymn to the Immortal Wind by MONO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEvpqR6B8ns

very much agree with all taht

I expect that there will be a split between the US and Europe in the coming years. The US sees China as its main adversary, and Europe is losing strategic relevance for the US because Russia is not an ideological opponent the way USSR was.

However, if the US simply left Europe then it would end up gravitating towards the east, first economically, then politically. That would be highly undesirable from the US perspective as it could result in a huge Eurasian bloc with from Europe, to Russia, to China. In my view this is what the war in Ukraine is all about. In fact, National Interest published a very revealing article back in 2021, while it focuses on Russia, it’s pretty clear how the argument extends to Europe as well https://nationalinterest.org/feature/strategy-avoiding-two-front-war-192137

The US has also been predating on Europe economically since the start of the war. US companies have been enjoying selling energy to Europe at high prices while Biden’s inflation reduction act lured companies away from Europe. Today, Trump is building on this strategy with massive tariffs designed to stifle Europe’s economy and lure more business to the US. The threat of Russia is also being used to force Europe into massive increase in military spending, most of which will go to American military industry.

All of this is bad news for Europe economically, and that’s creating a lot of internal political tension. As people see their standard of living collapse, they’re turning to nationalist parties because the neoliberal center has lost its credibility in their eyes. Hence why we see a surge of support for RN in France, AfD becoming a major party in Germany, and so on. I expect we’ll see more of what we saw in Romania where elections will be cancelled, candidates arrested, parties banned, and so on. All of that will further delegitimize the current system as people start realizing they’re not living in a genuine democracy.

Unfortunately, the left has been systematically dismantled in Europe since the end of WW2. What I mean specifically is the economic left. Socialism in Marxist terms mean worker ownership over the means of production which is directly at odds with the current capitalist state of relations where private ownership is the norm. Most of what constitutes the left in the west, such as social democrats, does not challenge capitalist relations. These parties simply want to curb the worst excess of capitalism such as having the rich pay more taxes, provide more social services, and so on. These are reformist parties that seek some form of sustainable capitalism.

There are a handful of genuine socialist parties in Europe, but they’re extremely marginalized and I can’t see how they can break into mainstream politics at this time. One of the problems is with messaging. The right has a big advantage here because their narrative is largely compatible with what people already believe. In a sense, the right is also a reformist type of movement where they’re not suggesting any revolutionary change. People who become disillusioned with the mainstream have easy time gravitating towards the tropes the right peddle like immigrants being the problem and taking people’s jobs away.

On the other hand, accepting socialist narrative requires accepting that the current system is fundamentally broken and there needs to be radical restructuring of society. In my opinion, what socialist left needs to focus on is crafting its messaging in a way that resonates with the public. The narrative has to be at least as appealing as what the right offers for people to even start to listen.

Not really, because the main alternative to the neoliberal centre seems to be on the right. I’m really not sure what to expect in Europe in the coming years.