I am also testing and comparing different services at the moment, and Mistral with vibe is shockingly fast. But really bad at accuracy. And it quickly gets into loops. The vibe client is also not great, even things like copy-paste is not working well. Hopefully it will get better soon!
Not for lack of trying: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_(...
But like everything else Maduro did, it was a failure.
They never had this. Such regimes only have individuals holding crackpot ideas that they suddenly have the power to implement with little feedback mechanisms or checks and balances to hold them back from creating disaster. This ruined Venezuela, and will soon ruin the United States too.
Too many people on the left still think of Chavez as something more than a tinpot dictator and kleptocrat because he cloaked himself and his regime in the drapings of socialism. But this was a lie. Kleptocrat regimes have no ideology, as this implies a movement doing theoretical development.
The rot can be hidden for a long time, often showing itself only when the despot is replaced with another despot, casting the blame on the new despot, rather than the former and type of regime he led. Case in point: Maduro replacing Chavez. While Maduro lacked Chavez's charisma, they are the same.
All governments exist between two extremes - the personalist despotism or the institutional rule of law. A personalist regime can last a long time, but it is not stable. It lacks the self-repair mechanisms that only independent institutions with balancing power can provide.
What comes to mind right now is that the best book I've read on Venezuela is called "Things are never so bad that they cannot get worse". A leader of a personalist regime always seeks to have no clear successor outside his immediate family. That means once he is removed, the danger is civil war.
Great article by Anne Applebaum on the USA's pivot towards Russia and against the EU. Quote: "This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law."
Trump is also using every possible opportunity to show them that he will pardon them for any crime they commit for him or for themselves while serving him. Time is not on the side of the Democrats here. The regime must not be allowed to solidify and consolidate, it must be disrupted to the maximum.
I predict “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work" is going to go into the history books along with "Peace in our time", except Chamberlain was trying to buy British rearmament time, while Angus King and his cowards-in-arms is buying Trump time to complete his $170 billion personal militia.
The current discussion in the US about a third term for Trump just shows how important strict, unambiguous term limits for the highest offices of a country is. Kleptocrat movements are extremely personalist and weak when they must change leader. A one term limit would be much better than two.
I think this is an essential analysis in other to defeat the new fascists. The cultural and ideological parts of fascism are harmful but that is neither their strength nor their weakness - and to focus on it is a mistake. We must attack the money. I hope to have a longer substack article on it soon.
Richard Jevans: "one of the major and too often neglected factors holding the top ranks of the Nazi Party together was corruption: the receipt of massive gifts, huge increases in income, property and so on, that cemented the patronage relationship they had with Hitler in a relationship of clientage”
Paul Corner on Mussolini: "‘In a regime that rested heavily on a whole network of personal contacts ... corruption represented a kind of glue, keeping the network together… this discretionary nature of decision-making that rendered people so vulnerable to what was, in effect, blackmail…’
Götz Aly: "The Nazi leadership did not transform the majority of Germans into ideological fanatics ... Instead it succeeded in making them well-fed parasites. Vast numbers of Germans fell prey to the euphoria of a gold rush, certain that the future would be a time of unbridled prosperity."
My conclusion is that it is a modern version of something that has been around for as long as have historical record: Pillage and plunder. The nazis and the fascists both immediately maxed all ways to rack up national debt, plundered their own people, then looted other countries. Some quotes:
Fascism should not be understood as an ideology. Any particular instance of fascism is just an arbitrary confabulation of its leaders, some crackpot theory they have decided to latch onto, that is not necessarily shared with any other instance. Fascism, I realized, is above all an economic movement.
Reading Götz Aly and Adam Tooze on the economics of Nazi Germany in the evening while hearing about the kleptocratic smash and grab of 12% of an entire country's GDP in the morning finally made me connect the dots. These are not different movements, they are the same thing.
I usually read the most while traveling. For me, sitting in an airport terminal, in a hotel lobby, or on a train is perfect for concentration. The journey took me as usual from country to country in rapid succession. Eventually I came to Moldova, where I was told of the great bank robbery of 2014.
For a while now I've been trying to understand modern kleptocracies as something other and different than classical fascism. The old fascist regimes seemed so different than the modern grifter networks, but there were also clear similarities. So I took some weeks off to dive into it. A thread.
Obviously, when Trump and his henchmen lose power, the new White House ballroom should become a museum of corruption. Just like they turned Yanukovych's obscene luxury mansion in Ukraine into one. What is happening now must be remembered.
Savages, who puts ice in their coffee?
I wrote a longer blog post on how we should turn our migration policy on its head by pursuing win-win outcomes for ordinary people rather than chasing the far-right's talking points: open.substack.com/pub/notesbyr...
It is also nice to see a discussion of how we should define a more general interface between academia and government, where government can temporarily draw in academics while they keep their jobs. We need more of this.
A good article on how academics can be a key part of a restoration of democracy after an authoritarian takeover: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-social.... A key message here is that it cannot simply be seen as a rollback to the old ways, it must be a dramatic improvement over it.
Our collective information space needs to be seen as an organism - it needs active repair processes. The tech overlords cannot supply this - there is no profit in it. Only academia can provide a solution to this - and save AI from itself. And save all of us from living in a disinformation hell.
On top of that we have all the the active attempts to manipulate and poison such algorithms. Before, we had the search engine optimizers making havoc in the search space, but now that they can use AI to manipulate AI, this poisoning process goes into overdrive.
Worse, as it starts to feed on itself, as its outputs become its own inputs, it becomes poisoned. The discrepancies and the inaccuracies, they all accumulate in the lack of active repair. The information universe tends towards entropy and chaos.
The "Attention Is All You Need" paper is the fundamental basis for all the current AI craze. But in the end it just does for smaller pieces of information the same as PageRank did for pages - it blindly smashes them together using other people's organizing work. It is a limited by its availability.
Unlike their competitor Yahoo, they did not attempt to organize information themselves, they just combined everyone else's organization of information on the internet into one big engine. This was the genius of their PageRank algorithm. Other algorithms followed, and now large language model paper.