Here in Sweden, back in the 1400eds etc. the farmers often made war on the government whenever it did anything they didn't like. This had the long term consequence, that by the end of this era, self-owning farmers owned 50% of the land in Sweden, whereas in Denmark, which did not have this kind of violence, it was only 10%.
It's incredibly important to be feared and to engage in violence, so that you are in practice and can threaten your political opponents, and this remains true in a democracy.
It's important that powerful people know they can't trust that they will truly be protected by the laws if they do something which harms others-- that the veneer of civilization is thin and the masses dangerous. Otherwise you end up with very dangerous situations where people can get away with anything that's legal.
I believe it doesn't matter. You see, if you try applying this trick to different traits of a society, it would lead to conclusions like: it is impossible for us to build an environmentally conscious society because we come here by being environmentally unconscious. It is a historical determinism, and it just don't work. For example, Europe was mostly a constant war between states, but after WWII it managed to come to EU. No more wars between European countries. Or U.S. was a country of slavers and racists, and it managed to change itself. It is still not perfect, as I hear, but at least there are no more slavery or segregation, and racism is not accepted anymore.
The long gone history of a country is not a something that should be allowed to determine its modern narratives. You shouldn't forget your history, but there are limits you shouldn't cross. When I hear arguments going back for centuries, it is a red flag for me. It is most likely a propaganda.
Psychologists talk about two common failing of their clients. People often fixate over the past or they fixate over the future, while forgetting about the present. The healthy approach is to keep a good balance between the past, the future, and the present, with a strong accent on the present. The history determinism reminds me a lot of the over-fixation on the past, and propaganda actively tries to unsettle balances in people's minds and fixate them on anything but the present.
It feels like there’s a flaw in your argument somewhere. Your thesis is historical determinism doesn’t work and therefore using it as an argument for political violence is flawed. …But the fact remains that political violence does work and we expect it to work. For a current example, see the bombing of Iran to effect regime change.
Back to the argument that historical determinism is flawed…
I think it’s very reasonable to say that it happened in the past, therefore it probably will happen in the future. That’s the basis for pretty much any kind of prediction.
If you want to argue against historical determinism, you have to make the specific argument for why the current state is different enough that we can’t use the past to predict the future.
> it would lead to conclusions like: it is impossible for us to build an environmentally conscious society because we come here by being environmentally unconscious
No. My logic applied here would imply that environtal unconsciousness can produce results becuase we got here by being environmentally unconscious. And that is true, burning coal for energy, while unsustainable, does produce results. Youll get energy, on demand, in a controlled manner.
Now, we should be careful doing it, but if you go to an amazonian tribesperson and yell at them for burning wood for a fire, becaise solar panels exist, then thats doesnt make complete sense
Political violence is wielded against dissidents in the United States constantly. Another way to think of this is that a government that resorts to political violence against its own citizens is not a democracy.
Yes, exactly. One of the definitions of a State is that it's the organization holding the monopoly on legitimate use of violence.
When a State becomes undemocratic, it can more easily wield that violence against its own people. Part of the founding ideals of the US is the hope that the people would oust such a State, explicitly through the threat and application of violence if necessary, thus the second amendment.
Political violence created and has sustained democracy, democracy is what happens when the violence fails and violence is what happens when the democracy fails.
> Treating a rigged game as fair doesn't make it fair, it just makes you easier to beat
Not playing at all makes you easier to beat still. Anyone pining for civil war should vacation in a war zone first. It’s difficult to encapsulate the privilege of peace until it’s been lost.
I am a resident of the Twin Cities and I agree wholeheartedly with this perspective. I found reading the book Waging A Good War very educational about the deliberate, strategic use of nonviolence by the American Civil Rights Movement and its ultimate triumph as a means to win support and achieve social change. It was a clear and inspiring parallel for me during the worst times of this year so far.
That's the one! Space oat opera, I suppose I should have said.
Good grief, I wonder if it's held up. Oh, early Whedon, it's sure to have that "creepier than Tarantino" vibe at times, but maybe it'd be an interesting rewatch. Seeing a young Nathan Fillion is its own reward, certainly.
> Civil war or getting screwed by elites aren't the only two options. That's a false dichotomy
I completely agree. But political violence increasingly polarises the outcomes to those two. (The elites can buy gunmen faster than you or I can.)
California has a referendum system. Get an AI measure on the ballot. Companies that are doing the things Anthropic got fired for refusing to provide are banned from doing business in the State of California. (Or with the State. Find a balance that gets the votes.)
Something is fundamentally broken when the sitting president of the United States pardoned thousands convicted in a court of law of attempting to use violence to achieve political ends.
No wonder people are increasingly recognizing that democracy is now broken.
Comes impressively close to GPT 5.4 / Gemini 3.1 Pro / Opus 4.6! Mostly behind OpenAI on coding/agentic benchmarks, behind Google on text reasoning, behind Anthropic on Humanity's Last Exam with tools (surprisingly the only benchmark where Anthropic leads currently).
Meta hasn’t fully caught up, but they came close and I think can solidly claim to be a frontier lab again. I’d call it a 3.5 horse race right now, and hopefully their next model improves. More model competition is good!
Poor Grok 4.2 should probably be dropped from the table.
It's looking rather low on reasoning and long-range problems with the approach described. For example, even with 16 agents and compaction, the HLE score is significantly below Anthropic's Mythos. Like you, I can see the release as a net Good Thing, but apples-to-apples for each org's latest models do have Meta holding steady in the middle pack.
HLE encompasses very hard problems where the larger pretraining of Mythos probably matters quite a bit. I'm not saying that Mythos is not showing some amount of genuine improvement compared to e.g. the latest Opus; just that if you're going to compare models, you should at least make sure that the overall test-time workload is in the same ballpark given how high it seems to be for Mythos.
Grok code was my daily driver for months while it was free and it was fantastic - it is certainly no worse than it was a few months ago.
Unfortunately with LLMs everything is based off your use case, domain and the context you give it. I also use Grok daily for health questions as the other models are too afraid to give input on medical matters
They’re pretty upfront in their release post that they took an open source model and improved it with their own coding data. They mention “continued pretraining” (on top of the base model) and RL. Cursor never claimed to have done a full pretraining run.
More to the point, beating Opus 4.6 at coding and coming within striking distance of gpt-5.4 is impressive! The benchmarks outperform raw Kimi K2.5.
It’s particularly impressive given larger labs like Meta are struggling to catch up to OpenAI/Anthropic.
Beating Opus 4.6 and coming within striking distance of gpt-5.4 is impressive! Particularly given larger labs like Meta are struggling to catch up to OpenAI/Anthropic.
More competition among model vendors is great for developers!
Has HN really stooped so low that we are upvoting unsourced AI slop? This “article” is sourced to a random Reddit thread and was clearly written by an LLM.
> A Reddit researcher just exposed
>The technical reality hits harder than policy abstractions.
It is actually not argumentum ad hominem, not least because this author is clearly not a person. It is extremely relevant to substance of this post that it was written by an LLM based on an anonymous Reddit commit (based on "reporting" itself written by Claude).
>If it’s clearly wrong then demonstrate.
Sorry, this does not work in the age of AI. If you don't bother writing your own words, then no one should bother responding to them.
It has been demonstrated as being wrong throughout this thread and the original threads about it.
The original report was AI slop from Claude Code. If you go to the repo it doesn’t even claim that Meta spent $2B, that’s just a sum of a lot of numbers Claude could find, not the number that Meta spent on lobbying this.
>Surely if OpenAI had insisted upon the same things that Anthropic had, the government would not have signed this agreement.
Have we been watching the same Trump admin for the last year? That sound exactly like something the government would do: pointlessly throw a fit and end up signing a worse deal after blowing up all political capital.
While that thought crossed my mind, someone in a sub thread of parent comment made a point: OpenAI made a statement about how "We insisted this be not be used in those ways and DoD totally says they won't". Which sounds to me like they ceded any hard terms oand conditions and are letting the DoD use it in "any lawful means" which is what Anthropic didn't stand for.
You cannot out-astroturf Claude in this forum, it is impossible.
Anyways, do you get shitty results with the $20/month plan? So did I but then I switched to the $200/month plan and all my problems went away! AI is great now, I have instructed it to fire 5 people while I'm writing this!
Full stop, no "but". That's all that needs to be said on this thread.
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