Is it? Most people I know who have flags proudly displayed are left wing and their flags are usually one of: the Palestinian flag, the ukrainian flag, the LGBT rainbow flag, or the trans flag.
He’s a British artist, the sculpture is in London and the phenomenon of raising of St George’s Cross on every lamppost on every roundabout is a recent initiative of the British right. Most people will be linking the statement of this sculpture to this activity.
(I’m more likely to see the white rose of the House of York in “opposition” to the flag shaggers than a rainbow or anything else, in my neck of the woods, but there’s only a few of these flying)
I do like the wider interpretation though, that any ideology can blind you.
Allright, I'll bite. Could you tell me if there's any meaningful distinction between someone hanging a Ukranian flag and a... Russian Federation flag? Circa 2026, do those flags stand for something, when hanging outside of either of those countries?
If they do, what do they stand for, and what would someone hanging one, versus the other, be communicating?
It’s amazing how everyone thinks this sculpture’s message doesn’t apply to them. “My side’s flags are different, it’s the other side’s flags that are bad”. So many people here making this argument. It’s beyond parody, yet really so predictable. Amazing lack of self awareness. I thought this place was more rational than Reddit, but apparently not!
> It’s amazing how everyone thinks this sculpture’s message doesn’t apply to them. “My side’s flags are different, it’s the other side’s flags that are bad”
The sculpture's message isn't "flags are bad" - it's using a flag as a metaphor for nationalism/blind patriotism (based on the rest of the statue, the location chosen, what it's a response to, and Banksy's other works).
(What you call an "objective fact" here is - as you say - your report of your personal experience. Everyone else would probably use a word more like "subjective".)
Can’t help but notice the difference in sentiment between the flag that represents a people and a flag that represents a nation, especially historically.
Hmm? Which is which? Is this one of those British things people from normal countries don't understand? Like the difference between United Kingdom and Great Britain.
Perhaps I should have used the term “sovereign state”, as that’s more precise, even though when most people use the colloquial term “nation” (as in “nationalism”) they’re referring to a sovereign state.
A sovereign state has borders they can enforce to their own discretion (political gridlock notwithstanding), a stable and well-defined (non-transient) population, a single recognized government (both internally and externally), and ability to conduct foreign relations without being stopped by force or decree.
So, with that more precise definition out of the way, you can recognize that the flags in your links do not represent sovereign states, but rather peoples - who, coincidentally, are often fighting for their rights and freedoms.
Elsewhere in the thread are mentions of nation flags, like the Union Jack, which represent a sovereign state, and are instead often associated with national identity, xenophobia and oppression.
There's not a lot of difference there. Citizenship COULD be used, but now you're talking about two different domains of language. A person who is British but now has an American citizenship, still talks with a British accent and identifies as British is still British. The same way a trans person with XY is still a woman if she identifies as a women, even though that person is also a male in another domain of speech.
Humans who identify as "humans, not animals" are just stupid and wrong in the scientific domain of speech, but absolutely correct and reasonable in the colloquial domain of speech.
I’m not following your argument at all, could you try to word it differently?
The distinction I’m drawing is that flags that represent peoples are usually more ideologically pure: people seeking justice or rights. They may be co-opted over time by more actors who deviate from the original intention (e.g. Gadsden Flag).
Nation flags, on the other hand, are by definition exclusionary towards an outgroup that exists by legal distinction. In the historical record, nationalism rarely works out well for anyone who sits outside the definition of a nation. Nationalism is a useful tool during wartime, especially during the early years of a nation (e.g. colonial revolutions) or when facing an existential threat (e.g. Ukraine), but it’s an ideological debt that may end up being paid by future generations when someone comes along and wraps themselves and their ideology in the flag and paints their opposition as “unamerican”, for example.
Is your point that all flags have the same ideological utility no matter what they represent? Or is your point not talking about flags at all and instead focusing on the difference between “sovereign state” and “nation”?
> Nation flags, on the other hand, are by definition exclusionary towards an outgroup that exists by legal distinction
I did notice how extremely specific that was. Because the current LGBTQ+ grouping have been quite exclusionary towards even LGB for quite some time now. Your point that they can be coopted is something I absolutely agree with.
> In the historical record, nationalism rarely works out well for anyone who sits outside the definition of a nation.
"What did the Romans ever do for us?". Pax Americana has been ENORMOUSLY beneficial for billions of people starting in 1943 arguably. And obviously the Roman Empire was followed by the Dark Ages. You're cherry picking.
> Is your point that all flags have the same ideological utility no matter what they represent?
I think my original point when posting that there's a lot of flag waving on the left, is that... well.. the post before that claimed there isn't which is just wrong. Now I would say that my point is that ALL movements/nations/corporations/whatever are co-optable. There's absolutely no difference between nations or movements.
It's not a left vs right thing. It never was. People who say it are are historically ignorant, naive, willfully ignorant, or a combination of those. "Right" and "left" are pretty much meaningless anyway. We have to look at individual movements, people, policies, and actions individually without falling back to our own group identity to judge the moral character of the thing.
I've seen people claim that since "the left" were right about women's rights, then it must be ok whatever "the left" is doing now because historically "the left" is always on the right side of history. Just ignoring the 100+ million dead from communism.
Your first comment was subjective in general, and suspiciously pro-right anti-left - in my opinion.
You could have left it at that.
Instead you decided on an emotional outburst due to being downvoted by "idiots" - giving us all an absolute textbook example of "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt".
I wasn't asking it to define it. I came up with the list of principles first, then spent ages trying to think of a suitable name for them. It was quite gratifying when ChatGPT, without any context, when asked to guess what the term "freehold" might mean with respect to software, came up with almost the exact same set of principles. That told me that the "freehold" term is a pretty good fit. It would be an incredible coincidence otherwise.
Maybe. I think it's more likely that an alien probe - assuming there are aliens and they fly probes - would be the size of a cubesat, and we wouldn't even notice it.
Perhaps Oumuamua was the mothership and the solar system is now swarming with cubesats we're not noticing.
When I posted about this project here and on reddit a few months ago I got a lot of people asking for advice and learning resources. I promised I'd one day provide a detailed write-up explaining everything, so here it is :)
unique_ptr is much better because then each object has a sole owner, which makes object lifetimes much easier to reason about and you can't end up with cyclic references causing memory leaks.
I wrote a game of Tetris in JavaScript with SVG many years ago. It had nice graphics and was smoothly animated. I hadn’t heard of anyone else using SVG like that at the time.
I'm not sure this will ever be solved. It requires both a technical solution and social consensus. I don't see consensus on "alignment" happening any time soon. I think it'll boil down to "aligned with the goals of the nation-state", and lots of nation states have incompatible goals.
I agree unfortunately. I might be a bit of an extremist on this issue. I genuinely think that building agentic ASI is suicidally stupid and we just shouldn’t do it. All the utopian visions we hear from the optimists describe unstable outcomes. A world populated by super-intelligent agents will be incredibly dangerous even if it appears initially to have gone well. We’ll have built a paradise in which we can never relax.
What's the difference between your "agentic AIs" and, say, "script kiddies" or "expert anarchist/black-hat hackers"?
It's been obvious for a while that the narrow-waist APIs between things matter, and apparent that agentic AI is leaning into adaptive API consumption, but I don't see how that gives the agentic client some super-power we don't already need to defend against since before AGI we already have HGI (human general intelligence) motivated to "do bad things" to/through those APIs, both self-interested and nation-state sponsored.
We're seeing more corporate investment in this interplay, trending us towards Snow Crash, but "all you have to do" is have some "I" in API be "dual key human in the loop" to enable a scenario where AGI/HGI "presses the red button" in the oval office, nuclear war still doesn't happen, WarGames or Crimson Tide style.
I'm not saying dual key is the answer to everything, I'm saying, defenses against adversaries already matter, and will continue to. We have developed concepts like air gaps or modality changes, and need more, but thinking in terms of interfaces (APIs) in the general rather than the literal gives a rich territory for guardrails and safeguards.
> What's the difference between your "agentic AIs" and, say, "script kiddies" or "expert anarchist/black-hat hackers"?
Intelligence. I'm talking about super-intelligence. If you want to know what it feels like to be intellectually outclassed by a machine, download the latest Go engine and have fun losing again and again while not understanding why. Now imagine an ASI that isn't confined to the Go board, but operating out in the world. It's doing things you don't like at speeds you can scarcely comprehend and there's not a thing you can do about it.
> Now imagine an ASI that isn't confined to the Go board, but operating out in the world.
I don't think it's reasonable at all to look at a system's capability in games with perfect and easily-ingested information and extrapolate about its future capabilities interacting with the real world. What makes you confident that these problem domains are compatible?
That’s not what I was saying at all. I was using Go as an example of what the experience of being helplessly outclassed by a superior intelligence is like: you are losing and you don’t know why and there’s nothing you can do.
I completely agree with you. Chess/Go/Poker have shown that these systems can become so advanced, it becomes impossible for a human to understand why the AI chose a move.
Talk to the best chess players in the world and they'll tell you flat out they can't begin to understand some of the engine's moves.
It won't be any different with ASI. It will do things for reasons we are incapable of understanding. Some of those things, will certainly be harmful to humans.
> What's the difference between your "agentic AIs" and, say, "script kiddies" or "expert anarchist/black-hat hackers"?
The difference is that a highly intelligent human adversary is still limited by human constraints. The smartest and most dangerous human adversary is still one we can understand and keep up with. AI is a different ball game. It's more similar to the difference in intelligence between a human and a dog.
I think what Accelerationism gets right is that capitalism is just doing it - autonomizing itself - and that our agency is very limited, especially given the arms race dynamics and the rise of decentralized blockchain infrastructure.
As Nick Land puts it, in his characteristically detached style, in A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism:
"As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in, drenched in ever-higher densities of artificial intelligence, accelerationism won't be going anywhere, unless ever deeper into itself. To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon. Naturally — which is to say completely inevitably — the human species will define this ultimate terrestrial event as a problem. To see it is already to say: We have to do something. To which accelerationism can only respond: You're finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started? In its colder variants, which are those that win out, it tends to laugh." [0]
It doesn't do anyone any good to stress over non-existent things. ASI is a sci-fi trope, a pure fantasy in context of present day and time. AGI does not exist either, and AFAIK there's not even any agreement what it possibly means beyond very vague "no worse than a human".
In other words, I'm sure you're terrified of a modern fairy tale.
Couldn't agree more with the necessity for fast feedback loops. I've experienced the opposite, and it's not fun.
I worked with Clojure/ClojureScript (mostly ClojureScript) for a couple of years many years ago. It was the first time I'd worked professionally with a functional language, so I made a game of minesweeper in my free time to help get to grips with it: https://github.com/robjinman/cljsmines
Back then, I fully bought into the idea that functional language like Clojure were the future, especially on the web. The way application state is managed is perhaps the key virtue of functional programming - if you get it right, you can design your program to consist mostly of completely pure functions. I remember how enlightening that was once I understood it.
reply