nice

Context matters, when it comes to objective facts, a bunch of people thinking something is true doesn’t make it so. However, when it comes to subjective experience, then the opinions of people actually living in the country do matter far more than those of the outsiders.

I find what the model was RL trained on is really important. It looks like Qwen 3.8 is mainly focused on agentic coding, so it does really well there. But once you throw it at tasks outside the training then things start to fall apart fast.

A much more effective way to use models is to have them drive a deterministic tool like a calendar instead. Also, Qwen 3.8 is complete overkill for a task like that, you’re just wasting energy for no reason here. A much smaller model trained on agentic tool use would both work more reliably and use way less power.

You can run it on smaller hardware too, people managed to get 3.6 to run with 16 gb ram with stuff like quants and MTP. But the fact that you can run a model that performs as well as a frontier model from half a year ago on any laptop is frankly mind blowing.

During the 1932 Holodomor Famine, the USSR sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:

While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul’chyts’kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food

Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.

Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.

According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest

It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.

Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, its interesting to see that the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2500600

Also, don’t know if you were aware, but famines were common in tsarist Russia and were one of the major factors driving the revolution. So, then one last famine happens before the new system is fully established, and all you trolls point at it as if it’s evidence that the system doesn’t work. Seems like it’s more relevant that there were no famines in USSR going forward and people ate more nutritious food than Americans.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. :)

Oh I agree there, the end result is what matters. And I think we can view this in a similar way to a person using a calculator to crunch large numbers. It’s just a tool to help us think about bigger problems.

Yes, it obviously matters if we have more math problem solved because a lot of math problems directly apply to engineering which lets us build new and interesting things we couldn’t make before.

For sure, we don’t really have a formal definition for what things like thinking or consciousness are right now. So, it’s all a bit slippery as a result. :)

I do think that our minds are probabilistic engines, and what makes the whole thing work is the feedback loop. Since we have embodied consciousness, our internal simulation of the world gets constant feedback from primary reality keeping it on track. And we can see how quickly human minds go off the rails when that loop is broken when people get disorders like schizophrenia.

I kind of view consciousness as a workspace for the mind with most of the work happening within the subconscious. Consciousness is a mechanism which forces all the parallel processes within the mind to go through a single bottleneck and settle on a single course of action.

Incidentally, I really enjoyed The Society of Mind by Minsky, I am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter, and Consciousness Explained from Dennett. They do a fairly good job discussing the plausible mechanics.

Are you suggesting women somehow have less inclination to become scientists than men? Please do provide sources for this fantastical claim.

I disagree, thinking is simulating. Our brains evolved to create an internal world model which allows us to simulate hypothetical events and project into the future based on that. Abstract thinking is just applying this mechanism to non-physical things such as math, where we internalize the rules of the system through study and then develop intuition for creating valid connections.

Most were rural people with farms

lmfao they were kulaks who owned serfs

yeah that’s grim

yeah pretty much, the society here drills into you that owning more stuff is how you show you’re successful

it’s kind of crazy how obsessed people can be with status

I love how these threads always make you fash come out of the woodwork.

lol there is that demographic for sure

It’s a completely different dynamic from commercial services. It needs enough users to continue developing the software, to operate servers, and to create content on the platform. There is more than enough users on the platform to ensure that it can operate indefinitely at this point. Meanwhile, most people on Mastodon, just as the case is with Lemmy, are on it because they want an open source platform. So, they’re not going to jump on another proprietary garbage platform BlueSky or W. And if a better open source platform comes along that’s a win for everyone.

And I’d argue that chasing growth for the sake of growth can itself be harmful. When you have a slow trickle of new users then they adapt to the existing culture of the platform. But if you have a huge influx of people all at once they can erase the existing communities in the process.

That’s the big question, cause I doubt there’s going to be huge demand for phones that cost a couple of grand in this economy. The fact that Apple’s been trying to secure RAM deals in China suggests they realize they need to keep prices down. We’ll have to see how it works out for them.