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Cake day: February 9th, 2025

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  • How many trillions of neuron firings and chemical reactions are taking place for my machine to produce an output? Where are these taking place and how do these regions interact? What are the rules for storing and reshaping memory in response to stimulus? How many bytes of information would it take to describe and simulate all of these systems together?

    The human brain alone has the capacity for about 2.5PB of data. Our sensory systems feed data at a rate of about 109 bits/s. The entire English language, compressed, is about 30MB. I can download and run an LLM with just a few GB. Even the largest context windows are still well under 1GB of data.

    Just because two things both find and reproduce patterns does not mean they are equivalent. Saying language and biological organisms both use “bytes” is just about as useful as saying the entire universe is “bytes”; it doesn’t really mean anything.



  • If you want to boil down human reasoning to pattern recognition, the sheer amount of stimuli and associations built off of that input absolutely dwarfs anything an LLM will ever be able to handle. It’s like comparing PhD reasoning to a dog’s reasoning.

    While a dog can learn some interesting tricks and the smartest dogs can solve simple novel problems, there are hard limits. They simply lack a strong metacognition and the ability to make simple logical inferences (eg: why they fail at the shell game).

    Now we make that chasm even larger by cutting the stimuli to a fixed token limit. An LLM can do some clever tricks within that limit, but it’s designed to do exactly those tricks and nothing more. To get anything resembling human ability you would have to design something to match human complexity, and we don’t have the tech to make a synthetic human.








  • Sensationalist? They give a very clear picture of what the orders were and are a perfect microcosm of how Stalin’s regime operated with the violently anti-communist Nazi’s.

    As your well sourced historical analysis states there are plausible reasons for the policy but that doesn’t change the fact that the USSR acted to project and protect its own influence. You don’t get to dress it up as “saviors of Europe” or “benevolent protectors of Poland”.

    As for using Russia and USSR interchangeably, I pretty obviously use it due to the outsized russkie influence on USSR policy. Stalin’s USSR was a hard turn from Lenin’s korenisatsiya, Russian culture and interests were first among “equals” (from Stalin’s own mouth). Waxing lyrical about the USSR’s diversity is pretty irrelevant in most conversations and especially here.

    And next time you stalk someone’s post history, use a little more critical thinking. In no way do I support just about any of the USA’s foreign policy. I call a spade a spade and operate in real life, outside the confines of internet ideology. You have no clue what I do or don’t do in real life, regardless of what I post. Keep fighting that strawman, trooper, maybe it will go better for you than this thread.


  • Dang bro you had Russian imperial apologism ready to go that quick? Impressive.

    I’m not going to engage with most of what you wrote because everything I’ve said is a fact, it’s not up for argument. The maps delineating eastern Europe exist, these conflicts happened. The Soviets oh-so-valiantly opposed nazi aggression except for when they didn’t.

    Hey look, here’s a Soviet and Nazi officer shaking hands after the invasion of Poland:

    Here’s a German soldier giving flowers to the crew of a Russian tank:

    Somehow if you’re a fan of an imperial power (UK, US, USSR, RUS, CHN, etc…) your invasions are always the product of specific circumstance. It’s always actually a liberation, or counter terrorism or defending world order. Your puppet government is always an improvement. The other team are the true bloodthirsty enemies.

    Let me cut through your mincing of the facts:

    The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time

    It’s not a secret that western powers were opposed to the Soviets; it’s not a secret that they did it to protect their own interests. If they cared more about being a bulwark against fascism those pictures would be Russian troops fighting side by side with the Poles. They could have even pushed into the German lines at any point before Operation Barbarossa.

    They did eventually win the eastern front, but they looked out for their own interests first. There are a lot of counterfactual histories where millions of lives are saved by decisive cooperation.


  • Here’s how the Soviets save the Poles:

    This might be the most backward brain rot comment I’ve ever read. Just gonna rapid fire through these…

    • Poland existed for a long ass time, even when it wasn’t on the map. It had no less than 6 armed conflicts and rebellions against the Russian Empire.
    • Poland lost 6 million people in WW2, 17% of their population; by far the largest of any country. If you want to play who-suffered-most they’re getting gold.
    • Maybe they would have lost less had the Soviets not joined the Germans in slicing up their country. They literally staked out what parts of eastern Europe they would own…
    • Polish independence was gained through the collapse of the Russian Empire; Moscow was in no position to claim control over anything anyway
    • Lenin renegged on that “self determination” just a few years later in 1919 when they marched the Red Army into Poland and annexed Kresy

    There’s a reason a Pole will tell you never trust a Russian, they’ve never been grateful vassals. I don’t subscribe to America’s red scare propoganda but you’re an idiot to whitewash Soviet foreign policy.







  • An official language is not a lingua franca. A lingua franca is a bridge language. It is –and can only be– the most common shared language between native tounges.

    They could add Esperanto as the official language for government beuraceacy, road signs, laws, public schooling and anything else under the purview of the state. That doesn’t automatically expand the utility of the language beyond those use cases.

    The population of the EU is ~450 million people. Let’s look at how that stacks up against language demographics today (combined first+second languages for 2025):

    • English 1.5B
    • Mandarin 1.2B
    • Hindi 609M
    • Spanish 558M [the biggest non-english European tounge]

    If we take out the EU’s 44% English speakers and make everybody speak Spanish (who doesn’t already):

    • English 1.3B
    • Mandarin 1.2B
    • Spanish 931M
    • Hindi 609M

    So putting aside the logistical and diplomatic difficulties, the math just doesn’t add up.