It's a dire situation and progress isn't nearly fast enough, but progress is getting made. The answer, as ever, isn't satisfying because it's boring and difficult: continue to organize and apply pressure to those in power to take action, and raise awareness by pointing to how it affects people in their own lives. This stunt does neither of those things, and if anything, makes our side look whiny and out of touch.
chaos
joined 1 year ago
Maybe there's a third option besides "do something ineffectual that most people will find annoying, offensive, and unrelated to climate change" and "completely resign ourselves to a climate disaster" that we can try?
"The leverage" to do what exactly? Put in someone who will be way worse? How does that help the left accrue power or accomplish our goals? If you think the Democratic Party's takeaway from the left tanking a major election will be "we need to move left more" I have a bridge to sell you. We are not a majority, which means we need to form coalitions. We can't do that with a reputation of blowing up everyone's shit when we don't get our way. We do it by showing how successful the party is when they listen to us and include us. No, this time we don't have a particularly left candidate to vote for. Yes, it all sucks. But I have yet to see a concrete explanation of how picking or allowing "far right fascist" over "moderate" has any benefit in the short or long term. To my eyes, it just causes vulnerable people here and around the world to suffer.
The UN is supposed to be a toothless, executively dysfunctional institution, that's a feature, not a bug. Its members are nations, whose entire purpose is to govern their regions of the planet. If the UN itself had the power to make nations do things, it wouldn't be the United Nations, it'd be the One World Government, and its most powerful members absolutely do not want it to be that, so it isn't.
It's supposed to be an idealized, nonviolent representation of geopolitics that is always available to nations as a venue for civilized diplomacy. That's why nuclear powers were given veto power: they effectively have veto power over the question of "should the human race continue existing" and the veto is basically a reflection of that. We want issues to get hashed out with words in the UN if possible, rather than in real life with weapons, and that means it must concede to the power dynamics that exist in real life. The good nations and the bad nations alike have to feel like they get as much control as they deserve, otherwise they take their balls and go home.
It's frustrating to see the US or Russia or China vetoing perfectly good resolutions and everyone else just kind of going "eh, what can you do, they have vetoes," but think through the alternative: everyone has enough and decides "no more veto powers." The UN starts passing all the good resolutions. But the UN only has the power that member nations give it, so enforcement would have to mean some nations trying to impose their will on the ones that would've vetoed. Now we've traded bad vetoes in the UN for real-world conflict instead.
What that "get rid of the vetoes so the UN can get things done" impulse is actually driving at is "we should have a one world government that does good things," which, yeah, that'd be great, but it's obviously not happening any time soon. Both articles mention issues and reforms that are worthy of consideration, but the fundamental structure of the UN is always going to reflect the flaws of the world because it's supposed to do that.
Of course anyone can vote for who they like, or not vote at all, no one's saying otherwise. It's Harris's job to earn your vote, and she clearly hasn't. But pushing third parties as the solution to any problem is going to do more harm than good until we get a better election system. It may feel better to vote for a party that more clearly aligns with your positions, but if they have no path to actually acquiring any power to make change, you're doing nothing while feeling like you did something. Changing the policies of a flawed party that actually has power is much harder, and yes, there might be compromise or half-measures, but that's an infinitely more productive path. (More productive than that is doing direct action outside of the electoral system entirely, but both things can be done at the same time.)
What does this have to do with anything? Yes, the Democratic Party is flawed. That doesn't change the fact that voting Green will make my political desires slightly less likely, and will make my political fears slightly more likely, compared to voting for a Democrat.
They're attacking Jill Stein because she's running a campaign that will have absolutely no impact on the world except for enticing some number of would-be Harris voters to instead throw their votes away. If the Green Party were serious about change, they'd focus on races where they could actually win instead of actively causing harm to the party that is much more likely to actually do the things they say they want. Instead, they've basically outright stated that all they care about is hurting the Democrats. It's a terrible electoral system that needs to be fixed, but until it is, third parties are always going to present a false option that effectively does the opposite of what their voters actually want.
It's all a stupid game. Israel killed some people, so Iran "had to" respond to save face, and then Israel had to do the same. Once everyone is satisfied that everyone knows both countries have very big and girthy missiles, they can finally back down from a war no one wants (hopefully).
Archive Team looked at this about 10 years ago and found it basically impossible. It was around 14 petabytes of information to fetch, organize, and distribute at the time.
Do you think electing Trump will be read as "wow, the US is taking a principled stance on Palestinian rights" by the world?
"Lossless" has a specific meaning, that you haven't lost any data, perceptible or not. The original can be recreated down to the exact 1s and 0s. "Lossy" compression generally means "data is lost but it's worth it and still does the job" which is what it sounds like you're looking for.
With images, sometimes if technology has advanced, you can find ways to apply even more compression without any more data loss, but that's less common in video. People can choose to keep raw photos with all the information that the sensor got when the photo was taken, but a "raw" uncompressed video would be preposterously huge, so video codecs have to throw out a lot more data than photo formats do. It's fine because videos keep moving, you don't stare at a single frame for more than a fraction of a second anyway. But that doesn't leave much room for improvement without throwing out even more, and going from one lossy algorithm to another has the downside of the new algorithm not knowing what's "good" visual data from the original and what's just compression noise from the first lossy algorithm, so it will attempt to preserve junk while also adding its own. You can always give it a try and see what happens, of course, but there are limits before it starts looking glitchy and bad.
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It's a massive difference in scale. For one, before you even leave the womb you have millions of years of evolution shaping the initial structure of your brain. Then your "training" begins, but it's infinitely richer than anything we're giving to these LLMs. Sights, sounds, smells, feelings, so many that part of what your brain is learning is what it must ignore. You're also benefitting from the interactivity of your environment, you can experiment with things and get feedback for what happens. As you get older and develop more skills, you can start integrating them together to do even more complex things, and the people around you will use their own incredible intelligence to specifically tailor your training to what you need as you learn and grow.
Meanwhile, an LLM is getting fed words, and learning how to predict the next word. It's a pale shadow of the complex lives humans live. Words are one of the more powerful things we have for thinking and reasoning, so if you're going to go all in on one skill, it's a rich environment for learning and in theory the contents of all of humanity's writing probably contains all the information necessary to recreate human intelligence, but our current technology doesn't even come close to wringing every ounce of knowledge from the training sets.