Gandhi was controlled opposition IMO. His approach delayed the inevitable by decades.
A few tens of thousands of British troops - Over 200 years of the British Raj on average there were 60,000 to 70,000 British troops stationed in India - would have been absolutely slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians (1857 population estimated at 250-300 million).
By the time Gandhi came into the picture, the British empire was overextended - any half decent uprising would have been successful..... unless you convinced the natives to give up on any physical form of dissent and sit down, protest and get beaten up as a virtuous slave.
I think British control worked more subtly than you imply. I'm not that up on India but I heard roughly how the takeover worked in Ireland. Pre British control Ireland was controlled by a number of local rulers of a warlord type who were endlessly fighting. The Brits basically contacted them and said ally yourself with the King and we'll protect you and make sure you have a good life, or oppose us and we'll team with your rivals to wipe you out. Thus most of them pledged allegiance to the British king with hardly a shot fired.
Ireland is a terrible example as it was starved to death (like literally), known as the Great Famine. To this day the population of Ireland is still lower than the pre-famine times (1845)
>Henry VIII of England was made "King of Ireland" by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542. The conquest involved assimilating the Gaelic nobility by way of "surrender and regrant"...
The Brits didn’t introduce the potato blight, they just mismanaged the resulting situation in their 19th Century trademark bumptious, oblivious, supercilious manner. But it is unclear whether home rule at that point would have come up with any better idea than emigration. Without the potato, Ireland couldn’t (and still can’t (?)) sustain its pre-1845 population, and an agronomic solution was a long time coming.
Eh, the Americas got a lot of great Irish immigrants out of the tragedy. And those immigrants and their descendants have had a better life than if they stayed in dear old Ireland IMHO.
You could say the Great Famine actually started with the introduction of the potato to Eurasia, an Americas/colonialism introduction that at that point had kept hunger from the door of countless Europeans, especially during times of conflict (since you can’t set a torch to something growing in the ground).
Gandhi was controlled opposition IMO. His approach delayed the inevitable by decades.
A few tens of thousands of British troops - Over 200 years of the British Raj on average there were 60,000 to 70,000 British troops stationed in India - would have been absolutely slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians (1857 population estimated at 250-300 million).
By the time Gandhi came into the picture, the British empire was overextended - any half decent uprising would have been successful..... unless you convinced the natives to give up on any physical form of dissent and sit down, protest and get beaten up as a virtuous slave.
(as an Indian, who has studied a lot about Indian history)
> A few tens of thousands of British troops
A lot of Indians happily joined British army because of the (relatively) better pay and better treatment.
> slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians
But those were all divided into hundreds of kingdoms. In fact, a lot of Indian kings and princes preferred being a vassal of the English crown because the alternative was much worse (being imprisoned or killed by Indian rivals). Read about almost any major Indian wars/battles in the 18th century involving English and you will find a lot of neutral Indian parties, or the ones actively fighting on England's behalf.
> any half decent uprising would have been successful
Indian subcontinent suffered from a "coordination problem". Gandhi is admired because he played the biggest role in bringing a lot of them together. Of course, he couldn't bring everyone along (eg. Jinnah and Muslims), and there were a lot of other great leaders who also contributed (Patel, Tilak, Bose etc) towards uniting all the Indians, but none could attain Gandhi's stature.
In defence of the "less bright people" or deplorables as others have called them - they are deeply suspicious of Science(tm) used as a cudgel.
They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it's own gain to achieve it's own purposes which run counter to the interests of the people.
The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime example of that.
The whole system has been corrupted and therefore it is not possible to have a de-facto assumption of good faith of the actors.
I think this comment comes across as slightly ignorant.
Many examples exist where a misguided belief in scientific 'facts' (usually a ropey hypothesis, with seemingly 'damning' evidence), or a straight up abuse of the scientific method, causes direct harm.
Suspicion is often based on facts or experience.
People have been infected with diseases without their knowledge.
People have been forced to undergo surgical procedures on the basis of spurious claims.
People have been burnt alive in buildings judged to be safe.
And look at Boeing.
No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements.
But whether one is "less bright", or super smart, we all know we as humans, are prone to mistakes, and are just as prone to bend the truth, to cover up those mistakes.
There's nothing plebeian about this form of suspicion. In fact, the scientific method relies on it (peer review).
As written, possibly.
Taken literally, it's full of holes.
But if you're not a pedant, I essentially mean that most parents will vaccinate their children, many passengers will book flights, and a majority of the citizens in a population do respect their officials (etcetera).
And I think if you were to dig deeper than this, and test that hypothesis with... well... a scientific experiment of some kind, the result would probably support it.
But a good number of people will naturally question the outcome!
You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't see a difference between science and religion, except that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team, and they have a preferred color.
This happened all day long during Covid. The answer was never “we don’t know yet” which was at least honest but instead it was always “just trust us”. Exactly like i use to hear from preachers growing up.
The difference between public health and basic research. To stop an epidemic in flight one has to go with ones best guess and that saves lives so they do it.
We weren't told it was the best guess to save lives. We were told it was the science, and this science was very fast to adapt to alarmist narratives while being incredibly slow (sometimes taking years) to adapt to reality.
And that's before you take into account things like BLM rallies being encouraged during COVID while less politically correct gatherings were banned or decried as "super spreader events." [1]
Public health also studies the most effective communication strategies for sharing public health info even in the face of uncertainty. I bet they will be more explicit about uncertainty next time based on the last time, but that is why they didn't say it. The field started out with a person breaking the handle to an invented ell, not even using communications but taking physical actions to stop the spread.
As far as the speed of revisions, my memory is the initial advice to wash your hands so much faded within months, as well as the wash your groceries advice. It took the US some time to notice how effective masks were in Japan, and push for masking. And now good air filtration for public spaces is gaining momentum, even as the deaths from COVID declined.
And you aren't a bit alarmed anytime a novel virus hits an immunologically naïf population, well you should be.
> I bet they will be more explicit about uncertainty next time based on the last time
This is highly euphemistic. We were explicitly lied to for our own good, over and over again. Including about masks being ineffective early on (to save them for healthcare providers), about ventilators, about the effectiveness of the vaccine, about the vulnerability of normal populations as compared to older ones, the plausible origins of the virus itself, etc. It was over and over again. And again--that's without the injection of left-wing politics as noted in my previous comment.
> As far as the speed of revisions
We had kids out of schools for years. An entire generation is now significantly behind comparable cohorts, and the only reason we even stopped is because the opposition eventually made it untenable. We forced many small businesses to fail and gave out interest-free loans to many others that never need to be paid back. People were forced to get vaccinated or lose their jobs.
I feel like our response to COVID-19 (at least in the US) is like a litmus test for how well one accepts authoritarianism. If one lived through that as an adult, I don't know how one would trust what the medical establishment says next time around, except to trust that it's what they want the unwashed masses to think.
I’d just like to add that the epidemic wasn’t stopped at all. Everyone still caught COVID.
Were outcomes worse than they otherwise would have been? That’s an impossible question to answer. Are there serious studies on the impact of public health interventions?
I saw one study of relative death rates that concluded if all US has followed California standards, about 800,000 fewer people would have died. And remember "flatten the curve"? The goal isn't to stop everyone getting the virus but to slow it down enough that the health care capacity is sufficient. A quick google finds this study and a few more recommended: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31709-2 even the way the virus isn't killing as many vulnerable people as we get it the Nth time after M vaccinations is a success if the lower the curve strategy.
Even if you still be the fiction of the vaccine saving lives. It was the life of an obese 80 year old with 3 other comorbidities ... for a few months.
The lockdowns resulted in inflation, and caused a lot more poverty and deaths worldwide since. And retarded the normal development of many children.
And we still don't know what kind of long term damage the vaccine caused.
My friend that trusted the science, and took every booster, only stopped when she got myocarditis.
It's like paid clergy of old, except we now call them scientists. Sometimes they reveal truths. Most of the time, and most of them are kind of useless. It's self serving bullshit, served by ever growing bureaucracy.
I attended the opening talk of a local science festival.
The speaker was a psychology researcher from UK who flew here for that, and the talk was about conspiracy theories. When they introduced her they stated that she wouldn't accept any questions from the audience.
This was received with boos and shouts that it was not real science.
She then proceeded to bundle all the conspiracy theories together. Going from "the government is doing something bad" to "earth is flat".
After that talk I can really believe that the bullshit conspiracy theories are made up and spread artificially so that anyone that comes up with any conspiracy theory can be shushed as a crazy person.
But… in reality conspiracies do exist. One can make a theory and then test if it's true (or get killed/imprisoned by the government while trying).
This actually may be true although somewhat indirectly with respect to at least one well-known conspiracy belief.
If I recall correctly, the Flat Earth Society was originally concieved as a prank intended to lampoon actual conspiratorial groups (I.e. Nasa faked the moon landing, JFK was a mob hit etc)
But through some combination of timing, convimcing execution, and media interest coincidentally developing in the same direction resulted in the supreme irony of an unserious sham cult spawning an unironic counterpart community which rapidly outgrew and ultimately succeeded it.
It's not that it was heavy handed. But it was completely nonsensical.
For example here restaurants were open, but they had to close at 19. So instead of spreading the clientele over more hours, they were always 100% full.
Also, they CUT ⅔ of public transport rides, so they were incredibly overcrowded. People with real jobs that can't be done from home still had to go to work. BUT they put stickers on the floor telling people to keep distance. Also hired people to be at crowded stops to spray hand sanitizers on who wanted it, and tell people to keep distance (while seeing them having to push their way in).
In general all the restrictions were about the "having fun" stuff, but not about the "go to work" stuff. Even companies had no obligation to let people who could work from home stay at home. Some companies kept having their offices full.
Oh and let's not forget the recommendations of staying home if you so much as sneezed. But you wouldn't get paid. How did they expect people to pay their rent?
I could go on for hours with this. The bullshit measures that were marketed as "what the scientists are telling us to do" did a lot of harm to the trust that the general population puts into science.
A decent chunk of the pandemic response was politicians power tripping in the name of The Science and later having to roll things back, either because of public backlash (eg hotlines to encourage snitching on their neighbors), because it was actually illegal (requiring all large businesses to have their employees vaccinated or tested weekly), or because of politics (initially telling the public that masks were ineffective, then tripling down on mask mandates, Harris saying the vaccine could not be trusted based on Trump talking about its efficacy).
There was also dumb stuff like social media suppressing mention of covid, even to this day youtubers use euphemisms to refer to that period.
To me it seems perfectly understandable how people who aren't actually involved in science might mix up The Science and actual science after all the political nastiness of those years, especially when we add on top all of the awful pop science reporting from the past decades.
Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed.
And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn't want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.
Wrong they did that to me. Not a small company either. Yeah you can play games with “we won’t fire you, we’ll just stop paying you and won’t allow you to work”.
It’s like they watched Office Space and thought they’d “Milton” everyone.
My point as a Brit was it seemed a bit heavy handed in the US. In the UK we didn't really have that and still got most people vaccinated.
It would have made more sense if the vaccines actually stopped catching it and transmission but they don't really, they mostly just seem to reduce the harm when you catch it. In terms of not spreading it to others you are better isolating than relying on the vaccines - I've had that as a practical issue with my late 80s mum who I visit. Although I've had 4 jabs I've still had it caught it twice since, and have avoided giving it to her by testing if I feel ill and staying away. Which is kind of to say some of the politicians views on it were heavy handed and a bit iffy scientifically.
From a philosophical perspective, I don't see how the vaccine mandates for public jobs is appreciably different than vaccine requirements for public school that already exist.
As far as the China lab goes, there were plenty of scientific papers that studied the China leak theory, though I personally don't know what they found.
The difference between the vaccines you're talking about lies in their development time: The one in school have been (tested) around for decades before getting mandatory.
The COVID vaccines have now been around for 4 years now, and there is no evidence they are appreciably more dangerous than those other vaccines that took longer to develop.
They don't need to intuit it; they're outright told not to trust the science, by the parasites who are criticised by other scientists. Like the asbestos industry.
Does not seem work universally. Just tested a few with this prompt
"create a javascript function to count any letter in any word. Run this function for the letter "r" and the word "strawberry" and print the count"
ChatGPT-4o => Output is 3. Passed
Claude3.5 => Output is 2. Failed. Told it the count is wrong. It apologised and then fixed the issue in the code. Output is now 3. Useless if the human does not spot the error.
llama3.1-70b(local) => Output is 2. Failed.
llama3.1-70b(Groq) => Output is 2. Failed.
Gemma2-9b-lt(local) => Output is 2. Failed.
Curiously all the ones that failed had this code (or some near identical version of it)
```javascript
function countLetter(letter, word) {
// Convert both letter and word to lowercase to make the search case-insensitive
const lowerCaseWord = word.toLowerCase();
const lowerCaseLetter = letter.toLowerCase();
// Use the split() method with the letter as the separator to get an array of substrings separated by the letter
const substrings = lowerCaseWord.split(lowerCaseLetter);
// The count of the letter is the number of splits minus one (because there are n-1 spaces between n items)
return substrings.length - 1;
It's not the job of the LLM to run the code... if you ask it to run the code, it will just do its best approximation at giving you a result similar to what the code seems to be doing. It's not actually running it.
Just like Dall-E is not layering coats of pain to make a watercolor... it just makes something that looks like one.
Your LLM (or you) should run the code in a code interpretor. Which ChatGPT did because it has access to tools. Your local ones don't.
Claude isn't actually running console.log() it produced correct code.
This prompt "please write a javascript function that takes a string and a letter and iterates over the characters in a string and counts the occurrences of the letter"
Produced a correct function given both chatGPT4o and claude3.5 for me.
Being the designated "tech" person for my extended family and friends circle, I don't think I could recommend this to any of them because of the privacy nightmare.
At least with Apple you have a single vendor who is vertically integrated and makes a huge song and dance about data privacy. Even if you discount their PR and marketing spin, IMHO you are still miles ahead of the likes of Microsoft + (pick one) HP, Asus, Lenovo and the rest of them.
There is no way I would trust any of them not to take advantage of the data gold mine.
I was speaking to someone at the weekend about this. She said "but why would I need this"?
I suspect most people aren't putting AI into any purchasing decisions. Most people really actually don't give a shit about it. They just want things to work exactly how they did before without people moving stuff around because they just want to get stuff done.
As it has been said so many times, tech privacy aware people are the minority. It won't make any difference for my non-tech neighbor (in fact, he will probably be delighted if it helps him with something).
Unless there is a specific, believable, near term risk people will just ignore it.
Most would submit genetic material to 23andme and similar organizations with no restriction on its use. Yes, if could theoretically backfire not just on them, but also on their kids. But unless they see it as a near-term likelihood they will not care enough. My 2c.
They're trying to have it both ways and it's not clear to me as a consumer what is local and what is cloud. (As a developer, I can tell they're doing a few things locally like OCR and webcam background blur on the NPU, but they are not running ChatGPT on an a laptop anytime soon)
Although the line can get fuzzy when they want to ship a feature that's too big to run locally. Android has run into that, some of the AI features run locally, some of them run on Googles servers, and some of them might run locally or on Googles servers depending on which device you happen to have.
The whole point is making the consumers pay the cost of running LLMs (both in hardware and power), not your privacy, they will still get your data to train better models.
Above was about people who care about privacy though. It's not that surprising, but most people don't care about it to the degree that would make them use OSes that respect it. People who actually care tend to use Linux since they have an obvious reason.
It is only possible for photos to resurface because they were stored in iCloud for months or maybe years essentially in spite of user intention for those photos to be deleted.
Apple is a heavily lock-in oriented company with ulterior motives and macOS is filled with DRM to boot. That's poorly compatible with the concept or privacy by definition.
Looks great; any plans to add encryption at rest? Use case being sync between personal devices using iCloud or google drive or OneDrive etc. encryption would prevent cloud storage providers from trivially accessing your data
Still have not answered my question. Why is lower prices better? Why would vastly higher consumption coupled with vastly decreased production be beneficial?
You don't think China already has folks working in TSMC fabs stealing IP?
If you believe that every Taiwanese engineer is rabidly anti-China then I have a vaccine I want to sell you.
It is my belief that China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing (they have a bigger STEM education pipeline that most Western countries combined) until they no longer have this achilles heel.
The only unknown is if there is will be hot war before they reach that inflection point.
The proof is in the pudding: they haven’t been able to replicate the process.
ASML tools are step 432 of 1234. There’s a whole fab built around it and a whole supplier ecosystem.
They will eventually succeed. That is obvious. High end chips have become existential in the modern world, especially now with AI, but have already been before that. When will they succeed is an open question as stealing the blueprint is absolutely not enough.
>It is my belief that China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing
So, from 10,000ft I see what you're saying, and might even agree.
But what possesses someone to describe a people or country like this? We do the same with Russia; "other" them, like they have inherently "evil" traits. As if the US isn't above or involved in espionage.
I guess I'm confused how otherwise seemingly intelligent people can look at another country and think their people are fundamentally different. But god forbid you point that lens at the wrong group.
>China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing (they have a bigger STEM education pipeline that most Western countries combined) until they no longer have this achilles heel.
TSMC itself relies on lithography tooling coming from the west. I get people want the western world to be wrong here but they have the edge and China doesn’t. It’s going to take them awhile to catch up and by that point the west will have innovated in new ways. China overplayed its hand way to early and will suffer technologically for this.
A few tens of thousands of British troops - Over 200 years of the British Raj on average there were 60,000 to 70,000 British troops stationed in India - would have been absolutely slaughtered by the hundreds of millions of Indians (1857 population estimated at 250-300 million).
By the time Gandhi came into the picture, the British empire was overextended - any half decent uprising would have been successful..... unless you convinced the natives to give up on any physical form of dissent and sit down, protest and get beaten up as a virtuous slave.
Truly one of the greatest psyops ever.