You can even become your own kingdom (see california, Hawaii, texas, ...) before becoming part of another kingdom.
It may not be straightforward, however; as Linebarger states:
> Formally, war may be defined as the "reciprocal application of violence by public, armed bodies."
> If it is not reciprocal, it is not war, the killing of persons who do not defend themselves is not war, but slaughter, massacre, or punishment.
> If the bodies involved are not public, their violence is not war. Even our enemies in World War II were relatively careful about this distinction, because they did not know how soon or easily a violation of the rules might be scored against them. To be public, the combatants need not be legal—that is, constitutionally set up; it suffices, according to international usage, for the fighters to have a reasonable minimum of numbers, some kind of identification, and a purpose which is political. If you shoot your neighbor, you will be committing mere murder; but if you gather twenty or thirty friends, together, tie a red handkerchief around the left arm of each man, announce that you are out to overthrow the government of the United States, and then shoot your neighbor as a counterrevolutionary impediment to the new order of things, you can have the satisfaction of having waged war. (In practical terms, this means that you will be put to death for treason and rebellion, not merely for murder.)
> ...
Note that this advice was from the mid-XX; in the XXI not all kingdoms seem to recognise the Geneva Conventions anymore!
These days it's probably a case of conjugating irregular verbs?
I am a (dissident turned) freedom fighter
You are a (perfidious) combatant
They are (drug-running) terrorists
Sadly we, the "good guys", created a dangerous precedent in the balkans when Kosovo unilaterally split from Serbia, under foreign (NATO) occupation moreover.
International law does not promote nor support unilateral secessions. If a region or autonomous republic wants to secede it should only do so in accordance to the host country laws. E.g. the Quebec and Scotland referendums were made in accordance to the host countries of Canada and UK.
But then we created that dangerous case where now every region can secede from their host one unilaterally, even if it's occupied by foreign forces. And in practice, the "legality" of it, really depends on international recognition and the undergoing narratives.
International laws have always been pleasantries, as there's no real ways to enforce them, but there were powerful incentives for everybody to play by the rules.
It's hardly a precedent, probably half of the countries worldwide have been formed by seceding from some other country against its will. U.S. would be in this half.
It's the first country to do so under foreign military presence since UN inception.
The only precedents of unilateral secession were Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia and Bangladesh from Pakistan but none did so under foreign military presence.
All of the Arab countries have basically seceded from Ottoman empire under an occupation of this or that European country.
"Unilaterally" is not easy to define. Sometimes there is a long and violent struggle for independence and the metropole eventually gives in and signs some paper, sometimes it is stubborn and doesn't sign anything - the difference is not that important in my opinion.
I’ve started asking people to show me their products. I don’t get good answers so far. Maybe that’s just my small sample size / bubble of people I interact with.
My thinking is that showcasing / interacting with products built by LLMs will tell you a lot about code quality AND maintenance.
I mean it’s easy to spin up static websites. It’s a whole another thing to create, maintain and iteratively edit/improve an actual digital product over time. That’s where the cracks will show up.
That also might be the core problem of agentic code: it’s fairly fresh so you won’t see products that have been maintained for long.
Thus, my current summary is: it’s great for prototyping and probably for specific tasks like test case generation but it’s not something you want to use when working on a multiyear product/project.
I no AI fanboy at all. I think it there won’t be AGI anytime soon.
However, it’s beyond my comprehension how anyone would think that we will see a decline in demand growth for compute.
AI will conquer the world like software or the smartphone did. It’ll get implemented everywhere, more people will use it. We’re super early in the penetration so far.
At this point computation is in essence commodity. And commodities have demand cycles. If other economic factors slowdown or companies go out of business they stop using compute or start less new products that use compute. Thus it is entirely realistic to me that demand for compute might go down. Or that we are just now over provisioning compute in short or medium term.
I wonder, is the quality of AI answers going up over time or not? Last weekend I spent a lot of time with Preplexity trying to understand why my SeqTrack device didn't do what I wanted it to do and seems Perplexity had a wrong idea of how the buttons on the device are laid out, so it gave me wrong or confusing answers. I spent literally hours trying to feed it different prompts to get an answer that would solve my problem.
If it had given me the right easy to understand answer right away I would have spent 2 minutes of both MY time and ITS time. My point is if AI will improve we will need less of it, to get our questions answered. Or, perhaps AI usage goes up if it improves its answers?
With vision models (SOTA models like Gemini and ChatGPT can do this), you can take a picture/screenshot of the button layout, upload it, and have it work from that. Feeding it current documentation (eg a pdf of a user manual) helps too.
Referencing outdated documentation or straight up hallucinating answers is still an issue. It is getting better with each model release though
Always worth trying a different model, especially if you’re using a free one. I wouldn’t take one data point to seriously either.
The data is very strongly showing the quality of AI answers is rapidly improving. If you want a good example, check out the sixty symbols video by Brady Haran, where they revisited getting AI to answer a quantum physics exam after trying the same thing 3 years ago. The improvement is IMMENSE and unavoidable.
The problem is it's inability to say "I don't know". As soon as you reach the limits of the models knowledge it will readily start fabricating answers.
Both true. Perplexity knows a lot about SeqTrack, I assume it has read the UserGuide. But some things it gets wrong, seems especially things it should understand by looking at the pictures.
I'm just wondering if there's a clear path for it to improve and on what time-table. The fact that it does not tell you when it is "unsure" of course makes things worse for users. (It is never unsure).
More so I meant to think of oil, copper and now silver. All follow demand for the price. All have had varying prices at different times. Compute should not really be that different.
But yes. Cisco's value dropped when there was not same amount to spend on networking gear. Nvidia's value will drop as there is not same amount of spend on their gear.
Other impacted players in actual economic downturn could be Amazon with AWS, MS with Azure. And even more so those now betting on AI computing. At least general purpose computing can run web servers.
Even suggesting that computers will replace human brains brings up a moral and ethical question. If the computer is just as smart as a person, then we need to potentially consider that the computer has rights.
As far as AI conquering the world. It needs a "killer app". I don't think we'll really see that until AR glasses that happen to include AI. If it can have context about your day, take action on your behalf, and have the same battery life as a smartphone...
I don’t see this as fanaticism at all. No one could predict a billion people mindlessly scrolling tiktok in 2007. This is going to happen again, only 10x. Faster and more addictive, with content generated on the fly to be so addictive, you won’t be able to look away.
What if its penetration ends up being on the same level as modern crypto? Average person doesn't seem to particularly care about meme coins or bitcoin - it is not being actively used in day to day setting, there's no signs of this status improving.
Doesn't mean that crypto is not being used, of course. Plenty of people do use things like USDT, gamble on bitcoin or try to scam people with new meme coins, but this is far from what crypto enthusiasts and NFT moguls promised us in their feverish posts back in the middle of 2010s.
So imagine that AI is here to stay, but the absolutely unhinged hype train will slow down and we will settle in some kind of equilibrium of practical use.
I have still been unable to see how folks connect AI to Crypto. Crypto never connected with real use cases. There are some edge cases and people do use it but there is not a core use.
AI is different and businesses are already using it a lot. Of course there is hype, it’s not doing all the things the talking heads said but it does not mean immense value is not being generated.
It's an analogy, it doesn't have to map 1:1 to AI. The point is that current situation around AI looks kind of similar to the situation and level of hype around Crypto when it was still growing: all the "ledger" startups, promises of decentralization, NFTs in video games and so on. We are somewhere around that point when it comes to AI.
No it’s an absolutely ridiculous comparison that people continue to make even though AI has well past the usefulness of crypto and at an alarming rate of speed. AI has unlocked so many projects my team would never have tackled before.
Anecdotally, many non-technical users or "regular joes" as it were that I know who were very enthusiastic about AI a year ago are now disengaging. With the rate really picking up the last couple of months.
Their usage has declined primarily with OpenAI and Gemini tools, no one has mentioned Anthropic based models but I don't think normies know they exist honestly.
The disengagement seems to be that with enough time and real world application, the shortcomings have become more noticable and the patience they once had for incorrect or unreliable output has effectively evaporated. In cases, to the point where its starting to outweigh any gains they get.
Not all of the normies I know to be fair, but a surprising amount given the strange period of quiet inbetween "This is amazing!" and "eh, its not as good as I thought it was at first."
> We should start assuming that in the near future the limiting factor on a state or group’s ability to develop exploits, break into networks, escalate privileges and remain in those networks, is going to be their token throughput over time, and not the number of hackers they employ.
Heh. What is probably really happening is that those states or groups are having their "hackers" analyze common mistakes in vibe coded LLM output and writing by hand generic exploits for that...
Keep in mind, these are from the sample that I've listened to. They're not trying to be too dramatic, they're principled in what they're creating, and the production is high quality.
Asking for an kingdom I know.
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