Malazan Empire: Grief - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

Moving over to the right thread.

 Macros, on 04 June 2026 - 05:05 AM, said:

I feel like this is chiefly a problem with capitalism and our insistence on constantly accelerating growth. Anything that gets too wrapped up in that is going to have roughly the same problem.

I have similar feelings about it making people stupider. That's mostly a problem with systems that care about the wrong things, like schools that care about you producing essays to get a grade rather than about learning.

 QuickTidal, on 04 June 2026 - 11:39 AM, said:

I think it's been known for ages reddit is a massive source for LLM data. I vaguely remember years ago you could prompt weird errors in early versions of ChatGPT using obscure reddit usernames. It's not a particularly a bad thing when you're just trying to train a model for "what does human writing sound like" which is the what LLMs have been built to do. Obviously no guarantee of factual accuracy but that's not what they're built for.

There's a similar fun one about early image categorisation models that turned out to basically be relying on certain kinds of photos being disproportionately likely to have blurry backgrounds. The nature of training data.

I do think it's unfortunate that people, especially on the left, seem to lock themselves into dismissing the technology itself on account of its environmental, social, or economic consequences.

What I mean by that is that people hate the environmental damage, hate the tech companies, hate the disingenuous arguments that the technology could justify that, and then seem almost obliged to take the stance that the technology itself must be rubbish. It feels like a kind of mental reverse engineering.

I often see this criticism that it's "just" fancy maths, as if maths is not an incredible discipline that has underpinned human progress in countless ways.

To even manage very basic tasks - summarise this text, turn this idea into a presentation, dig out some research on this topic - would seem like magic if you described them to someone ten years ago. And now I can give it a basic instruction and it will pull up the right applications and get going. The fact that we have essentially found a way to give human language instructions to machinery, that it can more or less parse into relevant actions, is a massive scientific achievement that people have been struggling with for literal decades.

This isn't to say the current generation of products are remotely human level. They're certainly overhyped, and I think there are huge problems with the economic model at play, and the continued destruction of our environment is horrifying in general. Nonetheless the technology is impressive. I think denying that is kind of wilfully ignorant about how difficult the "just maths" problems actually are.

I'm not sure it's a huge boon to Reform. We're years away from a general election.

There are potentially worse things Labour could do right now than hashing out their leadership. The party are losing support and Starmer simply does not seem like he's got another good election in him. I'd even favour it if they seemed to have viable alternatives.

The real problem is what can they do next?

Leadership contests in the Corbyn years have shown the party membership have a willingness to back candidates further to the left than the party itself wants to stomach.

Wes Streeting is a far cry from that, and is not clear at all he would win a straight contest against Starmer. Some of his allies might prefer to drop the matter if it looks like it will open up to a wider field of candidates. The longer it drags on the more awkward it looks. It's possible the will be enough to keep Starmer staggering on for now. I'm doubtful that is really their best interest for the long run.

I've believed for a while now that Labour's best bet is to shuffle their leadership before the next election - although ideally closer to it - and try to sell the new leadership as a break from the old party. It worked well enough for the Tories.

Reform, for all their touted success, do have vulnerabilities. They're taking on a lot of the Tory crowd and Farage has baggage. The threat is essentially a more unified right-wing vote than at the last election. That's not insurmountable. Labour have mostly done a poor job of articulating any real vision for the country, and have been especially poor at maintaining party discipline.

I think regardless of the seniority there should be consequences for those who have blatantly committed crimes, including lying to protect their boss. There's a question of public trust, as well as trying to make sure people are incentivized to say no the next time someone asks them to follow illegal orders. I'm not holding my breath obviously.

Personally I think the most important consequences need to go wider than specific politicians. Overturn citizens united, split up the concentrated media empires, and ideally reform elements of the judicial and electoral system.

Otherwise the message is that it's totally fine to encourage, fund, and facilitate any horror you like as long as you stay one degree away.

There are good reasons that other countries have often made structural changes after getting through a governance/constitutional crisis.

The most important thing is changing structures to avoid future crises. Punishing the most recent one does matter too. The democrats managed neither thing after the first Trump administration.

Cause, on 18 April 2026 - 01:03 AM, said:

That's a very debateable (and debated) statement. The word "instigated" does a lot of lifting.

American perspectives on the coup like to blame the British, typically by arguing they took advantage of America's paranoia about the spread of communism. This glosses over the fact that the British had no meaningful ability to pull of the coup by themselves. Mossadegh expelled their staff in late 1952, almost a full year before the coup itself. The Americans on the ground were instrumental both to the build up of the operation and its success on the day.

It also glosses over US support for the oil blockade in the lead up, that the US persistently negotiated on the side of the UK when push came to shove during the crisis, the fact that US oil companies were arguably the largest beneficiaries of the coup, and continued US support for the Shah in subsequent years.

Britain absolutely wanted the coup and absolutely encouraged the Americans to do it, and obviously the nationalisation of British oil interests kicked off the crisis, but the coup itself relied on Americans and could not have happened without them. The same US administration proved perfectly capable of going against British interests when it suited them, demonstrated most obviously at Suez in the same period. It's not like the Americans had no agency over their foreign policy, and no responsibility for its aftermath.

To state the obvious: the British are not in charge of the CIA.

The coup is fundamentally an American decision.