Not to sound inhuman (well I'm going to sound inhuman anyways), but DR Congo is perhaps the most irrelevant country geopolitically for the 115 million population it has. The stability of DR Congo does not make a difference to the stability of Africa on the whole in any way - if DR Congo were to descend into civil war (like it has before), it won't make a difference in any way, except for perhaps Rwanda. DR Congo could disappear one day and the world would continue moving forward like nothing else happened.
This is a country with hundreds of ethnicities and sub-ethnicities, that should not exist as a cohesive entity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Con...). The three decades it existed without a civil war, it was under the autocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko, under whose regime corruption and extrajudicial killings were rampant, as is typical with any autocratic regime. Following which, the army took control, which led to civil war and even more corruption and extrajudicial killing, which continues till today. This country is a money pit, something the Soviets learnt during the Cold War, and the Chinese today, and any initiative to uplift this country is going to end up in a blackhole. After all, how the heck is anyone supposed to establish anything longlasting in Africa's own backyard bullpen?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Con...
This reminds me of some early human remains they found in a cave Georgia (the country). It looked like one human lost teeth and in those times that would basically mean death by starvation. But the evidence suggests someone chewed the food for this person and they survived longer.
We thrive as humans because we look out for each other even when it seems irrelevant.
It is most certainly likely that the person who chewed the food for the person who lost his teeth was of the same tribe as the latter. We thrive as humans in a tribe, whose members look out for each other. The smaller the tribe, the more tightly we look out for each other. For bigger groups, mere tribalism won't work - that's when democracy shines. But then you always have the looming threat of your democracy descending into tribalism with political factions.
Africa is a mishmash of extremely poorly drawn borders, decided on the whims of arrogant aristocrats in hall rooms in Europe, without paying any attention to the inherent tribal cultures that were present in Africa - and the DRC is the most evident example of this. That's why you have a tiny country like Rwanda being able to support a significant rebellion in Eastern DRC, why DRC has more than 700 communities, with no community making even 10% of the population, why the government is unable to create any form of integration within the country. Like on what basis can the government unite the people together? "We all suffered under Leopold II of Belgium together"??
> You learn far more in a single year on the job than in your four year college degree (and I say this as an engineer)
I do not believe this is true in the slightest. I learned more in a single OS class than i learned in years of industry work. What you learn in industry tends to be distinct from what you learn in college, and if it isn't, then your college curriculum was probably a waste.
Encoder: Text tokens -> Fixed representation vector
Decoder: Fixed representation vector + N decoded text tokens -> N+1th text token
Encoder/Decoder architecture: You take some tokenized text, run an encoder on it to get a fixed representation vector, and then recursively apply the decoder to your fixed representation vector and the 0...N tokens you've already produced to produce the N+1th token.
Decoder-only architecture: You take some tokenized text, and recursively apply a decoder to the 0...N tokens you've already produced to produce the N+1th token (without ever using an encoded representation vector).
Basically, an encoder produces this intermediate output which a decoder knows how to combine with some existing output to create more output (imagine, e.g., encoding a sentence in French, and then feeding a decoder the vector representation of that sentence plus the three words you've translated so far, so that it can figure out the next word in the translation). A decoder can be made to require an intermediate context vector, or (this is how it's done in decoder-only architectures) it can be made to require only the text produced so far.
Encoder in the T5 sense doesn't produce a fixed vector, it produces one encoded vector for every step of input and all of that is given to the decoder.
The only difference between encoder/decoder and decoder-only is masking:
In an encoder, none of the tokens are masked at any step, and are all visible in both directions to the encoder. Each output of the encoder can attend to any input of the encoder.
In the decoder, the tokens are masked causally - each N+1 token can only attend to the previous N tokens.
These sorts of comments are going to go in the annals with the hackernews people complaining about Dropbox when it first came out. This is so revolutionary. If you're not agog you're just missing the obvious.
Something can be revolutionary and have hideous flaws.
(Arguably, all things revolutionary do.)
I'm personally not very happy about this for a variety of reasons; nor am I saying AI is incapable of changing the entire human condition within our lifetimes. I do claim that we have little reason to believe we're headed in a more-utopian direction with AI.
"Everybody in the US's alliance structure agrees that the US's top Middle-East ally is behaving completely appropriately, which is strong evidence that they are. I am very smart."
I'm not appealing to authority, I'm stating a fact. But even if I were, there certainly isn't a better 'alliance structure' to appeal to. In any case, it's a good thing your opinion on the matter is essentially meaningless (as is mine) which was the only point I was really making.
What I'm disagreeing with in your statement is the conflation of "real knowledge" with "power." It is true that all the most powerful governments in the West have taken roughly the same line on the charge of genocide in Gaza, but it is not at all the case that everyone with "real knowledge" has agreed with them.
Correct. You shouldn't decide whether there's a genocide going on in Gaza by consulting official statements from interested governments. You should decide based on independent human rights researchers, international law scholars, journalists, and so on. Opinion on the subject among these people is very much split.
Correct. People with no real view on the events in Israel get very excited to sneer at the "spoiled brat" protesters (who just willingly walked away from extremely fat paychecks). It makes them feel more comfortable about their own lack of moral fiber. The strong Zionists opposing this, I understand, but most people mocking it are just enjoying "the wokes getting owned."
This is textbook civil disobedience. They believed they could not quietly aid an ongoing injustice, so they loudly protested in the full knowledge they would be punished. This is how protest is supposed to work.
Of course the protest is about technology -- it's about the provision of technology to governments who use that technology for war. Why wouldn't you expect the employees of these companies have a position on that?
Like a lot of people here, I have family who died in the Holocaust. It is highly likely that the camps they moved through were using tech supplied by IBM. Would it have been "culture warring" for tech employees circa 1938, to publicize the human rights abuses being enabled by their companies? Because that's what the people who support these protesters think is going on here.
