Very apparent the zionist showed up just to play victim. Literally waves the flag at them like she sees it as a bull to provoke and then turns to the reporter with that liberal white picket fences “we gotta keep the riffraff out of the neighborhood” look of exaggerated affront/outrage. If she was speaking english, she’d probably be saying, “Never in all my life…!”

This is a combo that surprises me as to its effectiveness, but sometimes works significantly better than trying to devote my attention to the audio alone. Granted, if the game is too involved, I’m gonna go in and out on listening, but if it’s “brain free” enough as you put it, I can actually remember what was in the audio better sometimes. Best I can guess is it’s because the associations made in my brain between playing the game and the content of the book are stronger than listening in the abstract. I’ve also tended to think it has something to do with ADHD brain in my case, that the listening alone can be weaker because I get more easily distracted, whereas the right kind of game somehow stabilizes my attention enough overall.

Oh wow. Thanks for the context on it. I admit I had no idea of how complicated Brazil’s history is in that way.

Now I get it completely, thanks. Perfect image for what we were talking about.

“Yankee go to Hell. Go directly to Hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.”

Ohh okay, thank you!

What’s the context of this picture? Now I am curious. I don’t recognize the person, but I assume it’s somebody well known.

Happy for you and proud of you for keeping after it. Audiobooks are a great option!

I would say “Yankee go home” but what home is there for murderous occupiers like this, whose “home” is also land that they occupy as settlers?

If this is the reason revolutions haven’t happened yet, then why hasn’t more of the global south had successful revolutions?

It’s straight up delusion at this point, that they act like the US is in a position to demand how the war ends. We’ve seen how the empire acts, now and in the past. If it was in a position to demand, it would be doing it through a comprador regime, not through posturing to its own media while its forces get methodically pushed out of the Middle East, some of them in body bags.

So does this mean it’s likely that the person saying this awful stuff is a descendant of colonizers?

Hmm. Have you tried contacting them about it? Like do they have a support email or anything? Could be a false positive thing, but I don’t know. Hard to say without more information.

Is there any official statement from Deepseek on this or anecdotal?

And telling them you are going to take away their treats is even worse.

Welfare isn’t treats and implying it is, is going along with the Reagan-esque “welfare queens” narrative, of people who live an easy life off welfare while others do hard jobs. I doubt that’s what you meant, and you make some good points in the rest of your post, but I wanted to make sure we’re clear on that point. Lots of people in the US, for example, struggle with getting consistent, decent healthcare. Is that a “treat”? Is having a caffeinated drink from a hegemonic capitalist coffee shop on a regular basis a “treat” or is it a means of surviving in a culture that promotes overdoing it to get ahead? (Which in practice, is more like overdoing it to get nowhere fast.)

The imperial core does have a lot of individualist selfishness in it. I don’t doubt that at all. But it’s also far from pampered on the whole. The spoils of empire do not get evenly distributed to the imperial populace; not even close. And with the individualist selfishness comes pervasive sickness of mental health. Isolation, loneliness, depression, and so on.

So unless we’re talking about bougie imperial core people, in which case you have deeper problems with convincing them, it’s not even about “taking away treats.” It’s more about things like: “Will I continue to be able to pay rent? Can I afford transportation to and from a job? Can I afford medical care?” And some are already over the edge, in even worse straits. Homeless, for example.

With that in mind, I’d re-frame it to more like: “Telling someone you are going to take away their sense of stability feels like a threat.” I’d argue the primary issue isn’t “treats”, it’s the extent to which people still believe that the system is more or less stable and that a fundamentally better one isn’t really possible. Virulent anti-communism fuels the second one and embedded beliefs in “liberal democracy” fuel the first. But not only can these narratives be chipped away at actively, we can actively build alternatives that help people in real-time, which is the end goal anyway. Where the existing state fails, and we know it will because it is built on exploitation, we need to be there helping people through, not as a vague liberal volunteerism but as an explicit combination of political education and communal support.

To be fair, the factors they list are real (as far as I know, anyway):

The assessment points to a volatile mix of pressures ahead of Israel’s Oct. 27 election, including economic strain, rising military spending, anger over exemptions from compulsory military service for ultra-Orthodox Jews and escalating violence by Israeli occupiers in the occupied West Bank.

It also identifies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fight to remain in power as a source of further political and constitutional tension.

Years of war in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran have deepened existing divisions, according to the report, as soldiers return from prolonged combat, many suffering serious psychological trauma.

The military draft dispute has emerged as one of Israel’s sharpest internal fault lines, with resentment growing over exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men following repeated reserve mobilizations.

The assessment also points to Israel’s growing international isolation, including eroding support in the US, as another factor that could deepen internal instability.

But yeah, it’s not like this means civil war is imminent. It’s “factors that could lead to” and the circumstances of things are always in motion.

Is this what people call being “mentally colonized”?

Why would workers trust you if you are actively trying to make their lives worse and take away their hard won rights and social safety nets?

I was going to post similar, but you already said it well. Nobody is going to like communists who come across as wanting to make things worse, especially in places with embedded anti-communist sentiment.

Every neural network, including those in your own head, have sensory neurons that allow it to take in information from the environment. It can’t process anything without them. LLMs are trained primarily on symbols, but there is no reason you cannot attach these sensory neurons directly to things like cameras or tactical motor inputs, which many of times we do.

By this way of thinking, computers have been “taking in information from the environment” for decades, like when you type some text in a text editor. It’s greatly stretching the meaning of what sensation and sensory perception is.

Modern LLMs are obviously self-aware by the very definition of the word.

By what definition? As far as I can tell, you didn’t provide one. What I see is a couple of anecdotes on trying to trick a chatbot. Chatbots themselves aren’t even an inherent form of an LLM (text completion/continuation is). If you get rid of the mechanisms that make an LLM stop before it responds for the user, it can easily continue the text as them. It doesn’t actually know there is an it and there is a you. Much of what people take as traits of cleverness that are inherent to an LLM is a combination of the LLM itself and clever UI design / prompting by humans.

People primarily learning what LLMs are through chatbot harnesses like ChatGPT is honestly one of the worst things that could have happened to the field. It has truly damaged literacy about the tech and created a lot of wrong assumptions about what it is.

Indeed, you can take a screenshot of the conversation you are having with an LLM and feed it back into it, and ask it what that is, and it will recognize not only that it is a screenshot of a conversation, but a screenshot of this conversation that it is having with you right now.

Yes, it can label things. You can also (long before now) create a computer program that looks through a list of numbers and labels which are odd and which are even. You can create algorithms that do complex computation. Does this mean the algorithms are aware? Or is it only seeming like awareness now because it can simulate language?

Although, I probably know your response, you will just keep suggesting that it’s all some illusion or trickery of self-awareness and it’s not actually there, without justifying it either than explaining how it works by saying it’s “all linear algebra on GPUs” or something. So I don’t really need a response as I already know what you’re going to say.

I don’t think you understand why I am so staunch about this. It’s not that I think computation could never produce anything that qualifies as real intelligence, as similar to organic beings. It’s more that basing the argument on how convincing a computer is at talking like a human is like building a machine called the Fool Me Machine and then getting fooled by it and saying that people who point out it’s a Fool Me Machine are the problem.

It has to be investigated on a more foundation level than that. That’s why I bring up the hardware. People need to see past the surface level appearances.