The kind of stuff that people are doing with decision models today is largely the way I've been using Liquid AI's LFM models, as rapid iteration interrogation tools for atomic decisions. They aren't good at reasoning, but you can reason about what decisions you would need in order to come to a reasonably high quality decision about a thing.
Even though they weren't themselves decision models exactly, they were so fast that you could use them in a similar way. They obliterated Qwen and other models for a lot of tasks in that use case.
I'm not sure I would agree with some of the claims made in this article though. You can definitely do a lot of similar tasks to regular LLMs with decision models, you just have to chain the results. You can even technically infuse a broader perspective into each token choice or force certain context to have priority in the decision making of the next token.
People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.
Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.
You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.
It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.
If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.
> Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist"
The man that bought one of the most important social networks and has substantially changed its algorithm is nearly openly a nazi. It's not just the sieg hail the day of the presidential swear-in, it's everything he does to the world and the USA. And so do all the others.
> So you get the rude approach.
You're digging your own grave. Your president is handing over your empire piecewise to your adversaries for a fistful of gold. You must understand this: the only thing worse than communism, is fascism, because it's just corruption as a form of government.
Originally we had The League of Nations. The idea was a sort of collective defense. Europe failed. They did not come to each other's aid.
After WW2, that was the second time the US had to come stop the wars. We weren't simply going to join a defense pact if Europe couldn't demonstrate that its own collective defense had teeth. So the establishment of the Western Union was an attempt to demonstrate to the US that Europe was finally ready. Then NATO was formed.
Now, Europe has been underfunding its defense for decades and not meeting their NATO commitments, so that original question was back on the table. Can Europe even defend itself? Is it overly reliant on the US?
So, no. We will not apologize for being tough with you, because the world is changing and you no longer have the option to just stagnate. We're not losing any allies, that's just rhetoric and propaganda. You're not a serious person if you think that somehow western countries aren't going to help each other.
Making you stronger means you can help yourself or even help us later. Fundamentally, if our allies are stronger it also changes the Chinese calculus on how much of a threat from Europe they have to factor in before possibly starting World War 3.
The bottom line is, get off your asses and light a fire under your government to invest in defense spending, or be a small part of the cause of future millions of deaths, because your feelings were hurt.
If you don't even have enough compassion for fellow humans to want to stop World War 3, then you have no moral ground to stand on.
Your underpinnings for your arguments are the classic infant/adult fallacy where the people you're not sympathetic to are adults with incredible agency and power, and the people you have sympathy for are helpless children with no choices.
Putin wasn't forced to invade Ukraine. What was he even putatively trying to avoid? NATO's not belligerent (you can't simultaneously argue that Europe's military is pathetically weak, but also that it was so muscular and menacing that Putin had to respond proactively).
Hitler chose to start WW2. He wasn't forced to invade France to stop communism. He wasn't forced to attempt over and over to invade Great Britain to stop communism.
China, Russia, etc aren't looking for openings to start WW3. It would be devastating to them--just the war with Ukraine has had generational consequences for Russia. They also aren't innocent nations who, after intolerable saber rattling by the West, will have no choice but to start WW3. It's further not the case that the only deterrent to these innocent nations regrettably starting an insane conflict is a heavily armed Europe. The US is pretty heavily armed! France and GB are nuclear powers!
The way I see it, World War 2 was kind of a perfect intersection of the great depression creating a perfect opening for communist revolution as countries had seen during and after World War I and the protectionist contraction of trade during that time made matters worse. So you get countries that are simultaneously starving economically while risking being eaten alive by communism.
What we see today is different. Russia and China are projecting a shift to their hemisphere in terms of world influence. The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.
The CCP was directly established by Comintern, and even though the current thinking is that global communist expansion was abandoned, the way Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela have been behaving make communist or "post-communist" states a resurgent threat.
War would be devastating, but the idea is that if it was a World War, then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China. This is part of why we have supported Ukraine, but not overinvested. It's part of why we captured Maduro, who was threatening to invade his neighbor. It's also part of why we're sorting out Iran, because we need to take that trigger button out of China's toolchest. Imagine it going off while we're busy with China.
With the state of the world now, if China invaded Taiwan and tripped the Japanese tripwire, we would largely be free to focus on China. That is I think what Chinese analysts see now.
> The way I see it, World War 2 was kind of a perfect intersection of the great depression creating a perfect opening for communist revolution as countries had seen during and after World War I and the protectionist contraction of trade during that time made matters worse.
I think when economies falter governments falter, and their philosophies are discredited. So it makes sense that governments were on thin ice in the wake of WW1 and the Great Depression, and that more radical parties from the left and the right were ascendant. I think something similar is happening now, if of lower magnitude. But, no way was this a door only communists walked through, anarchists, fascists, etc were all in the mix.
> The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.
China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).
Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.
> then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China
You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.
Finally, I don't exactly know what you mean by "focus on China." The West's relationship with China is complex, a lot of people are focused on it. The likelihood of direct confrontation with them is quite low, as it'd be disastrous for both sides.
> But, no way was this a door only communists walked through, anarchists, fascists, etc were all in the mix.
Communism was an absolute existential, civilizational and culture destroying threat. That is how it was seen back then in Europe. Without that threat, fascism would not have risen. Communism wasn't a scapegoat for a totally separate fascist ideology, fascism was a direct counter to the threat of communism. People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument. So you can't separate them the way you do here.
> China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).
They are Marxist-Leninist to the extent that it is baked into their constitution and "corruption" often means you are not upholding Marxist principles or carrying forward the revolution. So, reformers, democracy advocates, not using your money to benefit the state and so on. From a post market reforms perspective, they are more like a neo-mercantilist command economy, but make no mistake that the Marxist philosophy is alive and acted on in China. They were being lax before Xi Jinping. Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.
> Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.
China does not need a giant navy with all these bombers, jets, carriers and destroyers, building out all these fake islands across the region and demanding that no regional countries allow foreign countries to help them with military fortification. They don't need all of that in order to take Taiwan. China lacks critical resources that would prevent it from being reliant on external trade, the same way Japan did. The difference is, Japan was afraid of communism and China wants to prevent the communist party from falling the way the Soviet Union did.
Taking back Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet is about finishing the communist revolution which in China was less about class warfare and more about anti-colonialism. It's even baked into their constitution for this reason. What they will do with their power once they have it, is unknown. What they already do with the power they have is very concerning and not promoting peace in the world. This does not suggest great peaceful eventual motivations in their region if that's what they support.
> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin.
Stop thinking about Trump admin this, Trump admin that. It's the US. It's a very common mistake for people to see some presidential candidate and think that's everything they are and when they become president then that's what the US is. Universally, the US has its own aims and the presidency tends to align with those aims in one way or another regardless who becomes president. Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb? That's basically what you're describing. We've got thinktanks on top of thinktanks on top of thinktanks and objectively some very smart people in the admin whether you like their politics or rhetorical strategy or not. Like, measurably. So, no. Your not understanding of strategy is not proof of lack of strategy.
> They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.
This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries. They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc). Communists just love controlling the resources. Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.
So, yeah we wrecked them and with good reason. The US treated them fairly in the 1950s, gave them a standard international oil deal like most countries have, built hospitals, schools etc but then the communists tricked the population into thinking we were stealing their oil, then they nationalized it and after that no oil companies wanted to invest there. So their oil infrastructure fell apart and in the 1990s/2000s Venezuela tried to reverse course on their communist resource manifesto and give oil companies the same standard OPEC style deal they had in the 1950s before the nationalization, but no companies wanted to invest again. Same problem happens in Cuba, because Cuba keeps inviting companies to invest and then they steal the company's assets and nationalize it or otherwise.
So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.
> People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument.
Again, Hitler didn't blitzkrieg GB because communism.
> Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.
No, it's Han Superiority. That's why they haven't expanded south: they don't care about non-Chinese. Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.
> China does not... need all of that in order to take Taiwan.
The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.
> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. ... Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb?
Obama spent years getting the JCPOA. Trump tore it up, spent billions of dollars, caused a worldwide energy crisis, and Iran's ascendant. Some presidents have better foreign policy than others.
> This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries.
Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.
> They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc).
The Biden admin didn't think this was credible.
> Communists just love controlling the resources.
Here's a quote from Trump:
“Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
Is Trump a communist or do more than just communists like to control the resources?
> Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.
This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.
> So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.
Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.
> Again, Hitler didn't blitzkrieg GB because communism.
Of course not, he never planned to attack the Brits. They declared war on Germany after Germany attacked Poland. To be fair, they told him that's what they would do if he attacked Poland.
One point of attacking Poland even though they were anti-communist and inviting Russia to join in, is to disguise the true aim from Russia which was to invade the Soviet Union and destroy the Communist International. And they certainly eventually did invade.
Japan would have joined in, but invading Russia from their side was very unfavorable.
> Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.
Technically they did kill the land owners and hand the land over to the workers. Then they murdered countless intellectuals and elites to make sure that workers had no competition in being on top. Then they enslaved the workers, tortured them, stole their production and took back their land. Even today they largely keep their wages suppressed.
You could argue that core Marxist principles are taking a back seat to national strategy, but the CCP higher ups are definite believers of Marx even if it might be easier to describe their system as some kind of neo-mercantilism. To them the reality is the same as it was under the Soviet Union. They cannot achieve their goal of communism in a world where capitalism also exists.
It's strange though how theoretically communism should be inundated with empathy, but in practice it barely cares about people and treats their lives as a commodity. It would be hilarious how stupidly bad their logic is in thinking that a brutal philosophy would be allowed to expand and control the Earth, if it wasn't so sad. They like to think of themselves as the clever deceptive geniuses who know better and are truly logical, erasing religion and going all in on science, yet they do the most insane illogical things that guarantee the most basic kinds of failure.
Failing to establish the fundamentals of a state to give most workers a decent living is bad enough, but to do that in exchange for a failed attempt to control the world is even worse. Failure has limited consequences too, because they can simply lie about how things are so the normal pressures that should exist for them to do a better job aren't as potent.
> The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.
That doesn't change what I said. They still don't need all of that. China is also of the Russian mindset when it comes to human life. They don't mind throwing a bunch of their people at a problem to go die, so casualties is not a big issue if it came to that. China has also shown itself very capable of taking negative results in order to reject something else. So if there is something they want enough, they can likely suffer for it.
> Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.
I mean, technically these countries don't formally publish charges for someone in an uncooperative foreign country, because the UN typically doesn't like going into a country to capture someone. That means they rely on the person coming to them or being extradited, but both of those require the person coming to their country so you can arrest them or avoiding them fleeing before an extradition. So you have sealed warrants that nobody knows about until the moment the person enters your country and they get arrested. The ICC was investigating Maduro and Venezuela, but their investigations have often been delayed and if they did have a sealed warrant for Maduro, nobody knows.
The way the US accelerated the timeline is that the ICC does not handle terrorism cases. By identifying that Maduro was assisting cartels that are on the formally designated Foreign Terrorist Organization list and that he was promoting the distribution of drugs into the US for _political_ reasons and these drugs have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, there is a kind of justification. For example, how we attacked terrorists in some countries without permission from a country is by claiming they are Unwilling or Unable to sort it out themselves or assist.
Another important distinction is that, if Maduro had been rightly elected he might have had more protection as a head of state, but instead since he stole the election and this was internationally recognized, he didn't have the same kinds of protections.
Some people argue that less fentanyl comes out of Venezuela than other countries, but they ignore the fact that cocaine alone has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the US so it is its own issue.
Obviously there is some gymnastics going on, but we would not have done this if it wasn't important.
> Here's a quote from Trump: “Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
That's mostly Trump trolling. Venezuela is still a sovereign state as per the UN, but we're managing their transition period since they don't have a legitimate government. The US used to have an oil deal with Venezuela that was pretty standard and quite the international norm. Communists then lied to the people and told them we were stealing their oil. They got elected and nationalized the oil, so oil companies left and stopped investing. In the 1990s and 2000s, Venezuela tried to return to the old deal to attract oil companies back, but nobody wanted to come back due to the risk they they would just nationalize their investments again. We're not simply taking their oil as "spoils", we're paying for it and the deal is structured to reduce the perceived risk that investors face when they invest in Venezuela. The deal is worse than what Venezuela used to have, but that's expected when you betray the trust of companies and investors which now means there's a risk premium included.
> This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.
Algorithm? It's called Reuters. It's called AP News.
> Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.
Venezuela was responsible for countless thousands of American deaths and has engaged in wildly unlawful things, disregarding international law blatantly. Maduro was not the leader of Venezuela, so we didn't abduct the leader. We are definitely blowing up drug boats, though and have taken out almost 70 of them now. In the middle east, we've launched strikes on lots of unarmed people that we designated as terrorists and these are just people working for the cartels that have been designated as terrorists. They don't have to be carrying a gun. These groups have killed over 1 million Americans over the past 20 years, which is more than any terrorist attack. I think a lot of people simply don't understand the scale of the problem we're facing in terms of grayzone warfare. The US is uniquely targeted, because we've been the only country standing in the way of countries like China or Russia having their way.
german here. just adding some soup to the meal, not offending.
for the definition what a nazi is, the movie "american history x" - that imo shows exactly what a nazi is: the main character is not german and not even in germany, but shows the nazi-mindset exactly! He glorifies hitler's thinking about others, fighting for the wrong idealogy for "own" country. ... Thats making a nazi. Neglection/sympathy for holocaust, supremacy thinking, .., too.
As I was told, the word nazi was invented by U.S. for the hitler and his followers so its a short word for national socialists (the party, its memembers and sympathisants) the US was fighting ("name your enemy"). Your question is about/implies nazi as "an individual person with a special characteristic", which makes that someone a nazi.
Its a "nation first + everything for the nation" thinking. For me a nazi is someone who glorifies the nazi time, saying it was all well done then, wanting those times back - like some elderly tend to say "earlier, everything was better". They dream of powerfull country with a straight people-body. Nazi think in races. And always say others are guilty for one's own failure, argument with "they" and "us" when they talk about own country/others.
So basically, patriotism, skinheads and far right are subsets of "nazi", but not full nazi :)
And may be, if one wants to be a REAL full nazi, its a must to shave the head and to have some on topic tattoos with being caucassian at the same time. This is how we differentiate them in germany - you see: "we" and "them". But i'm not nazi :)
funny, in US there was a nazi gang a few years ago, with the group's "leader" having the room full of nazi-stuff, flags and propaganda - as it came out later, he was jewish by himself and did not tell ..
Frank Meeik, Daniel Burros, but the one i mean was just like a joke of a nazi. But still dangerous thinking.
Exactly, which is what makes the Nazi/fascist/autarkist/autocratic position even more absurd. As we're seeing play out in the US, calls to "put the country first" are rooted in hate for the country that actually exists, and end up being quite destructive to the country's actual interests!
There would seem to be a common pattern whereby preaching of values tends to fill in for actually living out those values (eg religion, performative virtue signalling, so-called "rightist" libertarians), and the whole "put our country first!" or "make our country great again!" seem to be strong examples of this.
> Its a "nation first + everything for the nation" thinking.
If you think this means "our nation over other nations" then you misunderstood. It means "nation above all", e.g. "everything for the government, above citizens". That is, forget the individual, there is a greater good for which we must endure some hardship, trust me.
FYI, the promised land never materialized, historically.
> If you think this means "our nation over other nations" then you misunderstood. It means "nation above all".
A distinction without a difference, the second automatically leads to the first, no exceptions.
> "everything for the government, above citizens". That is, forget the individual, there is a greater good for which we must endure some hardship, trust me.
Right, in addition to being a code for "we over the others", "nation above all" also provides the excuse for the social mobilization necessary for wars. Nationalism is a tool of war, it may start in some covert form but the end result is the same.
Fair enough--so then, which successful nation has existed that prioritizes the individual over the nation's laws in any capacity?
Which successful nation has eschewed the idea of the greater good?
(And to your point--this absolutely has been perverted in various cases to justify atrocious behavior! It is necessary but not sufficient in order to govern well and righteously and be a successful country.)
It's not necessarily a binary choice, is it? There's a spectrum between true democracy that isn't simply "rule of majority", and authoritarianism.
There is a weakness in democracies too, that if they are too tolerant and allow too much freedom, this can paradoxically undermine democracy itself and lead to a collapse.
So in general, western democracies tend to respect human rights, sacrificing the greater good, because this in itself is considered a greater good.
The Soviets gave the Germans a free hand to begin the war by splitting Poland via the Molotov pact. Without that agreement, and without the preceding years of Soviet resource shipments and technical exchanges, it is unclear if the European war would have happened.
This is about as far as I could guess as well. Unfortunately by this logic you could just as easily implicate France and the UK for the Munich agreement, as well as the failure to excercise their defense pact with Poland. So essentially every party with exception of Germany and the United States is at fault for WW2. This also leaves the Pacific theatre unaccounted for as you implied. So I'm very curious what the original commenter intends.
It doesn't merit more response, you can just look at the reality of actual fascist states. Economic stagnation, the most extreme corruption and incompetence, and cruelty beyond imagination. True masterminds.
The rationale is that Communist International (Comintern) based in Russia at the time was openly aiming for total global communist revolution. These weren't simply activists (though there was that too), but actual armed militant Marxist groups. They were in China, Japan, Spain, Germany, France, Britain, the US you name it. It was a pervasive problem in the early 1900s.
The US and Germany were both helping fight back against the communists in China and Spain. Everyone was basically on board with being against the communists, they just weren't on board with the extremes to which Japan and Germany were going. Japan was passing laws to suppress Marxist revolution in their country in the 1920s and Germany went to many extremes, routing out communists anywhere.
In Germany you even saw education being changed to fortify new students as anti-communist, because preventing communist revolution from taking over Germany was existential for them. The teachers knew what they were teaching, but they were afraid enough of communism that it seemed a reasonable defensive mechanism. There had already been examples of communist revolution upending countries, so it wasn't as if it was a fake threat or concern.
It was very real, and people who dismiss the pacts signed between Japan, Germany and Italy to cautify the fact that they explicitly saw communism as a threat, do so in ignorance. It's often argued that it was some kind of fake political front to justify their actions, but on close inspection that seems to absolutely not be the case. These people legitimately believed communism was an existential threat.
This is further evidenced in the years after WW2, where there were many more communist conflicts in other countries. Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, etc. If you put yourself in their shoes, simply imagining being any of these countries, would it be unreasonable to feel an existential threat? No. Just, flat out, logically, no.
So why did they end up invading all these other countries? What was that all about?
The communists love to control the resources and in terms of a total global communist revolution, you've heard things like domino theory and you could understand it in numerous ways. One is that, if you expand to control a tipping point of resources, then you can leverage those resources to dominate the rest of the world and enforce your revolution.
Japan and Germany wanted to route out communism in other countries, but they also wanted to leverage the resources. Germany working with Russia to take Poland was largely strategic, not a sign of actual good faith towards Russia. Both Japan and Germany explicitly intended as their end goal, to conquer Russia and destroy Comintern.
This is part of why Stalin dismantled the Comintern, to deflate Japanese and Germany aims while simultaneously fostering military support from the allies.
Another critical point to support my argument, is that even if you don't think communism was the primary issue, why the heck would Japan and Germany join forces, causing it to become a World War? You could certainly argue that it doesn't become a World War until that happens. After all, people often make the mistake of saying the war didn't even start until something random in Europe happened and they can never ever convincingly explain how that caused the war to spin out of control. It makes no sense, because it is BS.
The war was already raging in the Pacific long before anything began in Europe. So why were the things in the Pacific happening? The thing that unifies both of these conflicts is communism.
People often deflect and just say oh Hitler was a racist and it was just this and that. They never answer the question: so what about Japan?
If they were fascist, what is a fascist? Many things, but most fundamentally they are a reaction to the communist threat. Communism is underpinned by a philosophy that all action is social action, so every person must be an activist. This puts society out of order rapidly, because anyone not involved gets overrun if it gains traction.
So fascists develop psychological counter-strategies to communism. That's why the Nazi flag was red. That's why they emphasize race instead of class, to unify people rather than divide them. That's why they uplift beautiful art and collected precious artifacts that communists hate and try to destroy. Everything was an intentional counter-strategy to communist revolution. It's easy to look back on it and say it looks insane, because it is and it is patterned as the inverse of communist revolution which is also itself insane. They wanted to immunize their country as a cultural powerhouse to fend off communism for all time.
And if the revolution was going to take over sufficient resources to steamroll other countries, then Japan and Germany were reasoning that they would need to expand to counter it.
Comintern wanting total global communism was logically inept and wrong for them to do. Germany and Japan going nuts and killing a ton of people was wrong for them to do.
It wouldn't have happened if the communists had not created a global existential threat. Remember too, this is before the internet, before pervasive communications and such. People still largely got their news from word of mouth, newspapers and radio so I'm sure there was plenty of miscalculation to go around, but the slow verifiable things were undeniable and that's what they were reacting to.
The communists have been threatening to start World War 3 and that is also what the Trump administration is reacting to today. Between Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, both Russia and China have lost essential partners in rapid succession. We've been helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure which has dual purpose, since it both weakens Russia and also demonstrates to China that not only is their Venezuelan and Iranian oil not secure, but not even the oil they get from Russia is reliable. China built the largest strategic oil reserve in the world which is something like double the rest of the entire world combined and they were going to use it to sanction proof themselves in the case of engaging with Taiwan. Now they are drawing it down, which reduces the chance of WW3.
There is whole genre of authors (Ernst Nolte, Viktor Suvorov, David Irving) who argue WW2 was all preemptive strike, that middle classes felt under threat and that soviets were preparing wide actions to take over europe.
It's revisionist history. Constructed arguments that quickly fall apart - like Yes Hitler was afraid of Bolsheviks but that doesn't explain why he invaded all the other countries France, Poland, Denmark, Norway... many more.
The repeat of the same trick on current events with Iran/Venezuela/Cuba is very telling. I doubt anybody believes that US attacks Iran because of communism. But yes all the US conflicts are because of communism.
More likely explanation is that big business backs fascism to crush social causes. Fascism exists to save capitalism from the people.
No, this is nonsense. I don't think that Russia was suddenly aiming to take over Europe in some big blitz attack. That is ignorant of what the fear of communism was based in. It was spreading just fine without any military invasion, though it was essentially supported by the communists in Russia and this was transparent to everyone, a mystery to none.
These countries had real world evidence of it happening and back then times were hard. You had starvation, unemployment, mistreatment and really societies were still trying to find the balance in an industrializing age. This was ripe territory for the spread of Marxism and it was adapted differently to a country depending on what the main complaints were.
Simply look at the spread of communism to other countries even after World War 2. You need to pay close attention to that, because it's the same fear other countries had before WW2. This was a very real issue and simply falling back on some propagandistic argument that the role of communism was overblown because of X, Y and Z, ignores all the reasons the communist threat wasn't overblown.
I think people forget that back then, death was normal and constant. People were dying all the time from all manner of both horrific and normal things. Most countries wanted to achieve some kind of stability and countries invading other countries was much more common in the recent history to them in a way that threatened them or in other words was normalized.
If the US had relative stability, England had relative stability and Russia had relative stability, countries like Japan and Germany did not. The great depression and communism both combined with the trade protectionism to create an internal existential threat. Suddenly you had mass hunger and unemployment. Yes they wanted to expand, yes they wanted more room for their people, but a strong factor that drove it to be existential was communism. Several of these other countries had already appeased communism, like France.
Germany and the US had already been fighting against communism in Spain and China, so this was going on long before the European side of the war started and it was a demonstrated actual acted on concern with evidenced history. If communism was going to expand, then if Japan and Germany wanted to survive communism or generally an expanded Russia. Like, think back then. You had Britain which had its empire. Now imagine a Russia that had an expansive communist empire.
Germany and Japan both had a rough history with Russia trying to take their territory. If they were going to be able to survive in an environment with an expanded Russia with vast communist acquired resources in an industrializing world, they would have to expand and establish control of resources of their own.
I'm not saying that it was right or good or that Japan and Germany don't take any blame and they were simply defending themselves, because that's not the case. Everybody made mistakes, but back then miscalculations were common and life was harsh. We take the comfy relatively peaceful life today for granted, but life was an everyday natural disaster back then by comparison to today. If you look at how Japan and Germany both prioritized their threats, communism was at the very top. It was real, they acted on it and as humans they acted in ways that demonstrate it was their highest priority.
Many European countries had official communist political parties and in the stable countries they didn't have much sway, but in other countries suffering from economic ruin from every direction, communist parties were gaining a lot of traction. The timing for why Hitler was appointed was explicitly because the communist party was gaining too much influence and reached the point of being an existential threat.
Make sure that you know one specific thing. Communism was basically known for dissolving countries from the inside, destroying their culture, their history and their identity. This is why it's more than simply worker activism, it's an existential threat to your civilizational existence. Japan and Germany both had strong cultures with a lot to lose.
There is no version of history where the communists are innocent, kind and good and there is no version of history where Japan and Germany are innocent, kind and good. That said, communism was actual evil even if on its surface it aimed to help workers. They legitimized and normalized horrific murder and assassination in all kinds of countries.
Part of the economic disaster that hit Japan and Germany was because of trade protectionism that went to extremes, because countries were protecting their local trade out of fear of communist revolution and they relied more on external trade for their needs. Without vast natural resources to leverage they couldn't sufficiently provide for their people without open trade which was closing down.
I've been doing my own research and taking notes for maybe 15 years. I'm not sure there's any author that thinks the way I do about it.
If I was to point at the absolute fundamentals, I'd say the open trade in the 1800s that caused many countries to rely on external supply chains leading to mass urbanization and hollowing out their agriculture created countries that were far less self sufficient.
With millions migrating away from the farms and working the land, moving to the cities, many countries were less self sufficient and it created an extreme imbalance and vulnerabilities. World War I might not have happened without that.
The economic issues combined with World War I was ripe ground for social movements which in the past were not always existential. When Russia was taken over by communists, they began to weaponize communism around the world. Any country that was undergoing hardship was a prime target.
Japan and Germany both suffered greatly from the 1800s mass urbanization with a weakened agricultural sector and when trade began to shut down in the 1930s to protect local economies out of fear not doing so would create an opportunity for the communists, this crushed Japan and Germany.
It would be fair to say then that there was some wisdom to globalism, but there was also some ignorance and it was not well managed. Yet, had communism not been the threat it was, global trade may not have receded as aggressively as it did.
So Russian weaponized communism, in full understanding of what communism actually is and how it operates in brutal destructive ways to destroy a society, combined with international imbalances caused by poorly managed trade in a rapidly industrializing world is a pretty good summary of what I see as the real causes of World War 2.
I'm not accurate about everything and I've made mistakes even in this thread which I didn't notice until after the edit option was gone, but I do make an effort to identify mistakes when I find an inaccuracy. Broadly, I think all the critical things I've said here will hold up as I haven't found convincing counter-arguments. If high quality counter-arguments are presented, I'm not closed minded and will consider them.
Regardless of the truth of the times, if you ever write a book with this view and cite your research where possible I suspect many of us would read it. The concept is fascinating.
I can't find any author with such a sweeping and elegant theory. But if you do have any sources of inspiration, reading material, or recommended authors at hand, I'd be happy to take a look.
The reason that many people don't understand how dangerous AI can be, is that listing the real dangers now becomes like a laundry list for less clever people to follow. It's highly unlikely you've ever seen publicly mentioned the real risks AI poses, because the vast majority of people are simply not clever enough to produce them and the few that are have no interest in spreading it.
If you go to the various CEO blogs or misc people within this sphere and peruse their lists, they don't scratch the surface. It's all pretty vanilla stuff.
A real problem is that you might not even need to give these internet access. If your neighbor gives their TV internet access and it can establish a mesh connection then it might be able to exfiltrate data that way. I don't know of any TVs that do this, but it's always been a possibility.
Another possibility is even if you don't give it access to your wifi, if you eventually give your TV away or sell it, the new user could connect it to wifi and if it has any persistent storage then it could upload all of its stored data about you at that point.
Companies that do this need to end their entire brand, because they're just helping the CCP.
> A real problem is that you might not even need to give these internet access. If your neighbor gives their TV internet access and it can establish a mesh connection then it might be able to exfiltrate data that way.
No TV has ever been shown to do this. Please stop spreading this rumor.
I didn't say a TV had been, if you read. I will absolutely not stop spreading the possibility, because it is in fact a possibility. This is more true now than it has ever been, because even if a manufacturer doesn't do this we're now in a world where AI could potentially exploit devices and make hops like this. The risk is higher in areas with higher population density though, like multi-story apartments.
We know that device connection sharing is a thing that has occurred and it's not unreasonable to see the risk of it coming to TVs.
Partly it annoys me because the answer to the question "how do I protect myself?" is simply "don't connect it to wifi" and that's it. These rumors make it all complicated to answer when it's really not that deep. This isn't deep NSA spy craft, it's shitty software uploading logs and half-assed data collection to the Internet. That's it.
But if I'm honest, it's mostly because I'm disappointed that they don't do this. It'd be a fascinating story. Imagine the braindead balls it'd take to make a feature that insanely abusive, and how good the outrage out it would be to read. That'd be a killer story for someone to break, it'd be like the xz backdoor or the Snowden NSA leaks. Instead we get these dumb "Mew under a truck"-quality grade school rumors in comments sections and it's just so stupid and disappointing.
(And honestly-honestly a tiny part of it is trying to goad one of these commenters into actually doing the work to find someone who really is doing this, so I can read that story.)
The story is both a little overblown and a little underblown, just different parts of it. More people need to be thinking about the feature level of devices and understand that "off" doesn't really mean it most of the time. Does the TV need a camera? Does it really need a microphone? Does it need to be smart at all? The matter of whether it is abused is increasingly less important than whether it can be abused. There have been all kinds of clever abuses we've been lucky not to see over the past 3 decades, but I'm afraid that relative quiet may be over.
I still don't understand why there wasn't an absolute outrage about internet providers putting their own routers inside your network and blocking other routers by default unless you call them. Suddenly all these providers have managed hardware inside your network and if they wanted to, they could scoop up all of the LAN traffic.
On top of that, some of them even portion out wireless to people outside your network from the router you're paying for while increasing attack surface.
The big tech companies, the providers, the government and foreign adversaries are winning bigtime. It does feel like there's a little bit of hope that people are wising up about AI exploding privacy and security risks, so more people are thinking about the dumbest things which have become the norms.
The guy can't read, he only knows how to keep saying "there's no evidence TVs do this" over and over, even when you already said there wasn't evidence yet.
Does this mean that TVs can never be recycled or resold now, adding to the garbage problem? All you have to do is sell the TV to someone who does eventually connect it to the internet and it will upload all the data it acquired while the previous owner had it?
If you ask any average gamer, "if you buy a game on Steam or on a CD from Walmart, do you operate on the understanding that you are now legally allowed to make as many copies of it as you want and sell those copies?"
The answer will unanimously be no. If they owned it, the answer would be yes. They might say they own it, but they will clearly and reasonably understand that they do not own it in legal terms, because they understand what they cannot do with it.
Some of them will understand that they can legally make copies for backups, but why would you need the law to tell you that it's legal for you to make a backup of something you own? You wouldn't.
You can buy a hard drive, but buying it does not give you the IP for all the technology that went into it. No reasonable person believes that would be the case, either. You can buy a car, but you can't then copy all the parts and start mass producing your own copies of that car. Do any of you go through the McDonalds drive thru and believe you now own the burgers, fries and all the packaging that goes with it to the extent that you can start up your own McDonalds with logo and all?
Whether it's physical or digital, even if people have contradictions in their head since they aren't lawyers, they understand enough about how things work to conclude that what they understood when they pressed the purchase button equates to not obtaining total ownership of all aspects.
It is simply true. This is so broadly understood that I don't even think you would need to use a jury. A judge could simply throw the case out at this point on that alone, if it hadn't already been settled in past legal precedent, which it has.
That is a horrible take-away from this, with only 28 tasks and a high pass rate for most models, it says almost nothing.
Test a model for your use case and use the fastest, smallest, cheapest model that 100% satisfies your use case.
Or, if you truly do need a model with strong generalized performance, definitely do not take a benchmark like this serious with such a limited task set.
I think they said they were keeping the old UD 2.0 quant for the larger sizes? So maybe they kept those the same and simply reuploaded them. They said the newer UD 3.0 quant performed worse on some things for the higher quants. So now it's a mix of UD 3.0 and UD 2.0.
For me that moment was Gemma 4 12B QAT. You're not suddenly going to start throwing your hardest programming problems at Gemma 4 12B QAT, it is still 15B parameters less. It's more that, aside from pelican art which isn't what local models are for, I didn't see anything on Simon's post that it couldn't assist with or largely succeed at.
It can run 80-100t/s on a laptop, can understand images natively and do bounding boxes, read tiny text, understands audio natively as well and can transcribe or translate anything you say, can do accurate long context retrieval with pretty large context windows, tool calling, excellent reasoning and is very token efficient.
It's only 7GB including the mmproj or 8GB with MTP. The Qwen 3.8 27B model Simon was using is ~18GB with MTP+mmproj, rather than 17GB alone. The point is not really that you compare these models directly, but that Gemma 4 12B QAT was really a special moment in model releases deserving of a similar reaction relative to its size, but was mutilated by Google themselves, Unsloth and Llama.cpp.
The overall appreciation I think we're seeing this year in particular is that people are easily surprised when multiple things are improving simultaneously which produce seemingly exponential changes. It isn't just that models are getting smaller, or that reasoning is getting better, or that speculative decoding is becoming mainstream, or that models can understand audio and images better now, or that they can reliably call tools which expands their capabilities, or that context windows are getting larger, or that accurate retrieval is improved, or that.... and so on. It's all of them narrowing in at once that is starting to make local models incredible and truly useful for far more use cases on the existing hardware people already have.
> It's only 7GB including the mmproj or 8GB with MTP.
Even more impressively it doesn't have a separate mmproj at all — it is fully integrated, and the vision encoder doesn't speak words into the LLM, as it were —- it is directly integrated into the model's weights.
I have banged on about this model here enough but I really agree that Gemma 4 12B is a candidate for the most impressive LLM of the year. It is remarkable, and I think because it is a small model that isn't apparently excellent for long-context agentic coding, it has been largely ignored.
It is, actually, quite good at coding jobs. (Though its grasp of nuance is a bit weaker. For example, it doesn't know that closures created inside PHP objects have implicit access to the object as $this, and always seems to need reminding.)
If you instead treat it as a prediction of what consumer on-device AI may very soon be able to do, or even as a possible future into a sort of lower-ratio MoE, or the basis of a modest private offline educational LLM model, it's very interesting indeed.
I've learned a lot from it — the fact that it performs so well at such a small size really does help you assess claims made for much larger models, and it's quick enough on my M1 Max to just muck about with.
I do think the release of these models was somewhat fluffed up, and I don't think it helps that the 31B model uses global attention so it underperforms on the kind of older GPUs that are on a lot of desks; it's no better on those than it is on my M1 Max, where other attention schemes seem to be radically better.
Now that tool-calling is mostly fixed, it's well worth playing with them.
Well in my case I'm using llama.cpp and the mmproj is required, but I think it is just an extracted part of the original model file. Even with audio, yes it technically supports them natively and they're "encoder-free", but in practice that doesn't mean no translation or processing is required before it goes into the model. It does require much less processing though, which reduces latency.
As for coding, for sure there are many important details that a model needs to know in order to produce correctness and the smaller a model is the more it ends up training out. If there's a task you do consistently enough though, often times you can simply provide a pile of essential context so it has good enough reference to not need the extra training data.
My issue with Gemma 4 is that any task fails to complete after any compaction event. It often ends up in a loop that keeps compacting and showing the same compaction output.
Qwen3.8-27B-IQ4_XS was a massive improvement. It's tasks survive compaction and actually get completed.
I switched to Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q3_K_XL for better performance and its working just as well.
Gemma4 screwed up a proxmox install I had. I booted to a SystemRescue install and tried to get gemma4 to fix it. It just could not do it and kept having issues where it dropped a linux command into the local powershell because it did not ssh into systemRescue or killed the ssh connection somehow so the text landed on the wrong system.
I told qwen3.8 to investigate fixing the partition. It said information was lost, but displayed enough info that it was easy to tell it was right. I told it to install fresh proxmox and gave a short rundown on settings and partition sizes I wanted. It made a plan and told me I had to manually installed proxmox by booting the iso. I responded with something like "there are other ways to install promox without human interaction so use one of those". That was it. I woke up to the system having booted to a new proxmox install with my previous ssh keys restored and my existing zfs pool already mounted.
I don't see how any model that is limited to a single context window in a single session would be viable for coding. I want something that can manage the entire project and not just individual files or inline suggestions. I need to be able to feed it all the info I would use to make coding decisions and then have it at least make a working project that it can launch and test successfully. You want it to ask as many questions up front to enable continuous work without stopping for human input.
Out of the loop here. What did Google and unsloth and llama do to mutilate Gemma? I can understand Google shenanigans but llama and gunsmith is kind of surprising.
Google provided incorrect settings and an imperfect template.
Unsloth modified the template and then finetuned their own version of the model to optimize for some benchmarks as a means of validating quants.
Google and Llama.cpp then adopt template changes by default, so anyone downloading the new model or even using the original model will now automatically be using it incorrectly.
Llama.cpp also uses the same inference setting defaults regardless which version of the model you use and some settings are simply defaults it uses for all models.
Then even if you account for all of these, you have to be using Gemma 4 itself correctly, which many people do not.
All of these little changes and inconsistencies hurt some of the model's original capabilities. Even if you go directly to Google's repo and download the full float 16 weights with the template they have there now, you cannot simply assume you're getting the best results.
I am very much a beginner to local LLM stuff and I find it incredibly hard to figure out how to run models optimally with the correct settings for my hardware. The number of different variations of the same model and how each quant work is super confusing as well.
When I tried to run llama.cpp directly I was getting max 9tk/s on qwen3.5-9B, then I tried LM Studio with the same model and got 77tk/s. I haven't figured out yet how to get MTP working properly in either.
If you are on Mac, have a look at the Llama-macOS app. They claim sensible settings for the linked model downloads. I'd expect the authors of Llama.cpp and the Huggingface folks to know this stuff.
I have had luck telling the free chatgpt my graphics card brand/vram and asking it to recommend latest qwen3.8 or gemma4 model variants. Then I pasted in my server command and ask it to optimize it. I also pasted in the token per second logs to get further tweaks. If you paste the token per second info log info back to chatgpt, you can iterate with the free chatgpt to get better settings.
And what's the right way to use Gemma? Where can I find the correct template and settings if those aren't the ones provided by Google, Unsloth, and aren't built into llama.cpp? I discarded using Gemma 4 because it got into weird loops when tool calling
Some weeks ago a new official Gemma 4 release was posted that corrected some of the chat template problems. So the official release files on hugging face should be the way to go.
Download the original model with the original template, not updated versions of the model or finetuned versions of the model.
Then create your own reasoning tests to verify that it is working correctly. You can set a specific seed value to make sure the generation is the same every time, that way you can identify any tokens that are different.
Afterwards, try making small incremental changes to the template and validate your tests each time in order to try to adopt the improvements from the newer templates. If the reasoning quality degrades, undo your changes and try again or test alternative solutions.
Log all the calls and run on a periodic cadence (cron or ever N turns) a larger model (like Opus) to read samples of the traces and edit the template to fix observed problems. There are some signs that help find interesting things to look at, errors of course, but also overly long responses, prefix cache misses, tool call errors, etc.
I run llama.cpp and specialized forks on 64GB of HBM and I still cannot figure out where to find the final correct guidance on using the Gemma 4 models.
Would appreciate any kind of pointer to the latest!
One issue I have with Gemma is that they seem to use old architectures that rely on full attention, requiring a lot of RAM for context and quickly degrading speeds as context is filled.
Qwen 3.5+ is much better in that regard with its super efficient context. Even on Macs, speeds take degrade much more slowly.
> One issue I have with Gemma is that they seem to use old architectures that rely on full attention, requiring a lot of RAM for context and quickly degrading speeds as context is filled.
Yes, this is something I hope they will change. Gemma 4 31B is much slower on pre-Blackwell GPUs as a result, which is a bit of a shame for local model experimentation.
Even Muse Glimmer (as did GPT-OSS I think) does ~4 sliding window attention layers + 1 full attention layer (like Gemma 4). I’m assuming both labs have good reason to think that gated delta nets are not optimal.
Of course it’s possible the labs just stick with the optimal architecture for large models and GDN is best for smaller models.
I've found that the Gemma series of models are made for someone entirely different than myself. They fail at even the most basic questions I throw at them, like 12B just now failed at answering how `XGrabKey` from Xlib is used. It hallucinated the entire API and made up an entire flow of code based on it, for no particular reason. It could've even decided to research this via web search because I have a tool specifically set up for that, but it "chose" not to, relying instead on completely made up information.
This isn't an isolated incident, really, I find myself always having these issues with the Gemma series. I'm sure they can do useful things for someone else, but for the things I want to use LLMs for (very small code generation, quick questions, code review) they always seem to disappoint me. I'm sure it's because of the stuff that I do and use, but it's a very consistent red thread with these models for me.
Edit:
The same question for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B produces a pretty concise and correct answer that would be useful to the questioner, without even going to the web. I don't know what Gemma models are trained on, but it's not the stuff that's relevant to me.
Even though they weren't themselves decision models exactly, they were so fast that you could use them in a similar way. They obliterated Qwen and other models for a lot of tasks in that use case.
I'm not sure I would agree with some of the claims made in this article though. You can definitely do a lot of similar tasks to regular LLMs with decision models, you just have to chain the results. You can even technically infuse a broader perspective into each token choice or force certain context to have priority in the decision making of the next token.
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