Russia actually operates 8 nuclear powered ice breakers right now, and they’re making more. https://www.thebarentsobserver.com/news/here-comes-yakutia-russias-newest-nuclear-icebreaker/422559

that’s right, authoritarian just like your bedtime

kind of yeah

To make sense of our current political moment, and to understand why electoral politics under capitalism is a stage managed by and for the wealthy, we must turn to one of the most consequential political thinkers of the last century: Vladimir Lenin.

If you were educated in the US, you almost certainly never encountered Lenin. Not in your high school textbooks, not in your university lecture halls. You will not see his ideas debated seriously on the corporate news channels. No mainstream politician, not even the most progressive, would dare utter his name.

It’s rather is a curious omission, is it not? For a man whose ideas shook the world, inspiring millions of workers to shake off their chains and establishing the official ideology of some of the largest countries on the planet.

So, in the land of free speech, why is the work of such a globally monumental figure treated as a forbidden text? Why is a thinker who provides a master-key to understanding modern imperialism and state power so diligently scrubbed from the curriculum?

Even at the most elite universities, in political science departments that posture as fonts of rigorous inquiry, you will not read Lenin. You will not be asked to critique him.

You might find a sanitized, fleeting reference to Marx, often dwarfed by the required reading of boosterish pieces from The Economist. In fact, at places like Harvard, the curriculum often reads less like political science and more like a corporate training manual. So why is Lenin a forbidden subject of study even in an adversarial way?

The answer is not complicated. Lenin’s genius was to lucidly dissect the rotting core of the capitalist system, exposing contradictions that cannot be patched over with mere reforms. And he did not stop at critique. He was not a moralist or an utopian, content with moral posturing.

And that is his unpardonable crime. Lenin wrote about the actual mechanics of seizing power, about smashing the bourgeois state and building a proletarian one. He provided a concrete analysis of how to win. This is the kind of dangerous knowledge the system cannot abide. It cannot be refuted, so it must be disappeared.

Consider the irony of how we would rightly condemn the Soviet Union as a brainwashed society if its citizens were taught to hate capitalism without ever reading Adam Smith. We would call it crude propaganda. Yet, millions of Americans are taught to reflexively recoil at the word communism by a system that ensures they will never encounter its theories.

What we find in practice is not free speech and academic freedom, but ideological policing. The very question of whether we could organize our economy differently is rendered unaskable. Those who advocate for a world beyond capitalism are systematically excluded from every institution that shapes public thought.

So, if you have any genuine belief in free inquiry, you have a duty to seek out the ideas that the guardians of power have placed beyond the pale.

Resources on Lenin:

State and Revolution https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm

What Is To Be Done? https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm

I mean if you have a verifiable set of steps that build from the answer to first principles, that does seem to enable trust worthiness. Specifically because it makes it possible for a human to follow the chain and verify it as well. This is basically what underpins the scientific method and how we compensate for the biases and hallucinations that humans have. You have a reproducible set of steps that can explained and followed. And what they’re building is very useful because it lets you apply this method to many problems where it would’ve been simply too much effort to do manually.

It’s like watching a grand master play chess with a toddler.

Cory Doctorow had a good take on this incidentally https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/

Which aspect of their approach do you doubt?

@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml kind of related to your recent post about hallucinations https://lemmy.ml/post/38324318

Think of it this way, the investors are basically like people going to a casino. They start with a bunch money, and they start losing that money over time. That’s what’s happening here. Right now, they still haven’t lost enough money to quit playing, they still think they’ll make their investment back. At some point they either run out of money entirely, or they sober up and decide to cut their losses. That’s what’s going to change between now and when the bubble starts to pop. We simply haven’t hit the inflection point when the investors start to panic.

It does actually

The economic nightmare scenario is that the unprecedented spending on AI doesn’t yield a profit anytime soon, if ever, and data centers sit at the center of those fears. Such a collapse has come for infrastructure booms past: Rapid construction of canals, railroads, and the fiber-optic cables laid during the dot-com bubble all created frenzies of hype, investment, and financial speculation that crashed markets. Of course, all of these build-outs did transform the world; generative AI, bubble or not, may do the same.

The scale of the spending is absolutely mind blowing. We’re talking about $400 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year alone, which is like funding a new Apollo program every 10 months. But the revenue is basically pocket change compared to the spending.

As the article notes, the reality check is already happening.

Much is in flux. Chatbots and AI chips are getting more efficient almost by the day, while the business case for deploying generative-AI tools remains shaky. A recent report from McKinsey found that nearly 80 percent of companies using AI discovered that the technology had no significant impact on their bottom line. Meanwhile, nobody can say, beyond a few years, just how many more data centers Silicon Valley will need. There are researchers who believe there may already be enough electricity and computing power to meet generative AI’s requirements for years to come.

The whole house of cards is propped up by this idea that AI will at some point pay for itself, but the math just doesn’t add up. These companies need to generate something like $2 trillion in AI revenue by 2030 to even break even on all this capex, and right now, they’re nowhere close. OpenAI alone is burning through cash like it’s going out of style, raising billions every few months while losing money hand over fist.

I expect that once it’s finally acknowledged that the US is in a recession, that’s finally going to sober people up and make investors more cautious. The VCs who were happily writing checks based on vibes and potential will start demanding to see actual earnings, and that easy money environment that’s been fuelling this whole boom is going to vanish overnight.

When a few big institutional investors get spooked and start quietly exiting their positions, it could trigger a full blown market panic. At that point, we’ll see a classic death spiral. The companies that have been living on investor faith, with no real path to profitability, are going to run out of cash and hit the wall leading to an extinction level event in the AI ecosystem.

If tech stocks fall because of AI companies failing to deliver on their promises, the highly leveraged hedge funds that are invested in these companies could be forced into fire sales. This could create a vicious cycle, causing the financial damage to spread to pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, and everyday investors. As capital flees the market, non-tech stocks will also plummet: bad news for anyone who thought to play it safe and invest in, for instance, real estate. If the damage were to knock down private-equity firms (which are invested in these data centers) themselves—which manage trillions and trillions of dollars in assets and constitute what is basically a global shadow-banking system—that could produce another major crash.

When that all actually starts happening ultimately depends on how long big investors are willing to keep pouring billions into these companies without seeing any return. I can see at least another year before reality starts setting in, and people realize that they’re never getting their money back.

almost as stupid as thinking you can stop American air power

meanwhile in the real world https://www.twz.com/air/how-the-houthis-rickety-air-defenses-can-threaten-the-stealthy-f-35

Exactly

The initial statement was nonsense, and it’s incredible that you keep doubling down on it.

Yeah, this is a key point that a lot of Western libs completely miss because they’re so caught up in their own moral grandstanding. Before the whole war kicked off, Putin actually had to deal with real internal opposition. A significant number of people, especially in the bigger cities, genuinely wanted more integration with Europe and the West in general.

But then the war started, and the mask came off. The West’s response wasn’t just sanctions on oligarchs or the government. It immediately devolved into this insane, open season on anything and everything Russian. We’re talking about regular people getting banned from sports and arts, calls for collective punishment, and just a flood of the most vile, racist garbage directed at Russians as an ethnic group. It went from “we hate Putin’s regime” to “we hate you people” in about five seconds flat.

And that was a gift from heaven for the Kremlin. They’ve been saying for years that the West secretly despises all Russians and wants to see Russia broken up and erased as a culture. Suddenly, they could just point to the news and say see? we told you so.

This completely nuked the domestic pro Western opposition. What were they supposed to argue for? Hey, let’s be friends with these people who are calling for us to be shoved back into the stone age? Their entire platform was instantly irrelevant.

So instead of turning on Putin, a huge chunk of the population, including many who didn’t even like him, circled the wagons. When you’re being told by the entire “international community” that you’re subhuman orc because of your leader’s actions, you tend to rally around the flag as a form of self defense. The West’s blatant chauvinism and racism ended up solidifying Putin’s power in a way he could never have managed on his own.

Love how you refer to me stating basic facts as gaslighting. Take care.

Dude, mainstream western media openly admits that Putin has mass popular support in Russia, but you keep on doing your copes I guess. Nobody is talking about Putin being any sort of hero here. What’s being said is that there’s no evidence to suggest that elections in Russia need rigging. Meanwhile, the idea that Russia is trying to replace the US as the global hegemon is beyond laughable.

you should let CNN know

But Putin undoubtedly has reaped the rewards of a political landscape tilted dramatically in his favor. The Levada Center, a non-governmental polling organization, consistently reports Putin’s approval rating at over 80% – an eye-popping figure virtually unknown among Western politicians, and a substantial increase on the three-year period before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/europe/putin-russia-election-explainer-update-intl/index.html

Again, this is a very US centred perspective. I highly urge you to watch this interview with the Alibaba cloud founder on how this tech is being approached in China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0PaVrpFD14

You’re such an angry little ignoramus. The GPT-NeoX repo on GitHub is the actual codebase they used to train these models. They also open-sourced the training data, checkpoints, and all the tools.

However, even if you were right that the weights were worthless, which they’re obviously not, and there were no open projects which there are, the solution would be to develop models from scratch in the open instead of screeching at people and pretending this tech is just going to go away because it offends you personally.

And nobody says LLMs are anything other than Markov chains at a fundamental level. However, just like Markov chains themselves, they have plenty of real world uses. Some very obvious ones include doing translations, generating subtitles, doing text to speech, and describing images for visually impaired. There are plenty of other uses for these tools.

I love how you presumed to know better than the entire world what technology to focus on. The megalomania is absolutely hilarious. Like all these researchers can’t understand that this tech is a dead end, it takes the brilliant mind of some lemmy troll to figure it out. I’m sure your mommy tells you you’re very special every day.