It does indeed increase internal temperature. Perhaps an artificial fever is part of it but I believe the science currently around heat shock proteins.
It's a meaningless, feel-good rule. Every country has countless carve-outs. To give you a trivial example: in the US, you can't get a passport if you owe more than $2,500 in child support.
Whilst I agree, to be fair, a passport is usually only needed when entering a country, not leaving one, right? Under the cited rule, the US needs to allow you to leave, not help you in entering some other country.
You generally do present your passport when leaving. Most places you get an exit stamp (which matches your entry stamp). They usually confirm things such as not overstaying a visa.
ex:
overstaying in Thailand results in a on-the-spot fine
China lately has exit checks when traveling to SEA (they try to intercept people traveling to scam centers)
That's mostly because transport companies have to pay to ship you back if you get turned away at the border, so they will want to see your permission to enter your destination country before you leave. I've traveled internationally a fair bit and I've never had to show my passport to government officials when leaving the US.
Ok, fair enough, but if I were German - I don't really think I would asylum anywhere on the basis of Germany maybe intending to conscript me in the future.
And "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person." Military service also serves the purpose to defend that right when the country is attacked. Rights aren't absolute, they have to be traded off against each other.
It's about time to finally grok that all world's military is only there to wage wars at the whim of the 0.001% under the guise of being defence-only, and that constitutions worth less than toilet paper these days.
Kill the royal couples, no problem. There is an argument to be made that those that start wars should be sentenced to death for doing so. Particularly frivolous ones of aggression.
Defense doesn't mean not to start a war. Think about how Vietnam justified their invasion of Cambodia in 1978, or how China started the war with Vietnam the following year, or how Turkey entered Syria, how Pakistan fought the Taliban recently, and of course what Russia did in Ukraine, 2014 and 2022.
Wars are messy and have always been. Military actions are to be decided by the governments. Those who have resources are more willingly to use it, west or east.
Rather: the "victorious" countries of the Second World war were afraid of a re-militarization of Germany. On the other hand, they wanted to re-militarize the Western part of Germany just a little bit so that West Germany could become part of the NATO.
Quite the contrary; up until the end of the Cold War both German states were highly militarized. They were quite happy to be able to roll back a lot of it after the reunification though.
Germany participated in the NATO military campaign/occupation of Afghanistan, including ground forces, naval activities and special operations units. Its seems a total of 150,000 German soldiers (and police officers?) were deployed overall (not at the same time of course); of them, 62 were killed and 249 wounded:
That is basically redefining the word defense, though.
I can’t be like “it was self defense” if I beat somebody up because they are getting too big at the gym and they could beat me up later if I don’t beat them up first.
That doesn’t mean such a thing is never ever justified, in international relations, it just ain’t “defense”.
Well that depends. Are they saying this because they have a problem with me specifically? Or is it because they have a problem with my asshole friend who I for some reason support financially?
If it’s the latter (like it is in reality, AFAICT), I would first do some serious reflection about my friend.
In the analogy, if you are financially supporting guy A who is harassing guy B and his family constantly over years, and as a kicker guy A acts like he’s done nothing wrong, it is human nature for guy B to be pissed not only at guy A but also at YOU who financially supports guy A even while you know what he is doing.
If you stop financially supporting guy A and sincerely apologize to guy B, and guy B continues to be pissed at you, THEN you can act like he is unreasonable and take steps to protect yourself, even if those steps hurt guy B.
You can’t pretend guy A is blameless and act confused why guy B is pissed at you, which is what is happening in real life.
So while many of the reasons are questionable (understatement of the year), let’s focus on the last one. After America lost the war in Vietnam, what happened to those neighboring nations? Did they suffer from Vietnamese communists? The only Vietnamese intervention was in Cambodia, and hardly anyone thinks that wasn’t the right thing to do.
The OP probably thought of defense in the narrow sense as "the action of defending against or resisting an attack", and not in the broader sense defined as "we’re going to travel halfway around the world to kill a million people because that’s who we are". A common mistake.
Not because “that’s who we are.” That’s a ret*rded retort. You go halfway around the world because you want to protect your friends and your nation’s interest.
Wouldn’t you do that to protect your family and your home, now and into generations? I think I know the answer.
That depends greatly on which interests you allow to be defined as "American". The vast majority of American people would have preferred not to be involved in most of our foreign adventures. The rich and powerful thought differently. Is our citizenship determined by the size of our bank accounts?
This is factually incorrect. Here are the estimates for the rates of support for each conflict at the beginning of the conflict:
- Iraq (Gulf War): 75-80%
- Iraq (2003): 65-76%
- Syria: 35-50%
- Vietnam: 65-75%
- Iran: 42%
Alexander Hamilton wrote that governance should involve people with “wisdom to discern” and “virtue to pursue the common good”. The US is not a direct democracy; it is a constitutional republic. The definition of what constitutes American interests is literally whatever the United States federal government says it is.
Yeah, by such definitions any country is justified to wage a war and always find a way to claim it’s for self-defense (which is indeed how most causus belli have worked throughout the history – they always claim to have the moral high ground when launching the war). This is also how essentially in every country it’s called the Department of Defense (unless you’re Trump) but that means nothing as they start wars all the same. Not a trace of any rules, accountability or restraints still remains under such a framing.
Rights are morally absolute, and the cynical insistence that they must be traded off is both fallacious and intellectually hypocritical. You want certain weaker rights, then just admit it, don't be disingenuous about it.
The constitution made it impossible to make a less sexist law, because it says that women cannot be forced to military service. It is an old document, and it is based on old role models. Modernizing the constitution would require 2/3 majority, and the government was already struggling with making a law at all.
> The constitution made it impossible to make a less sexist law
with the right level of public exposure citizens would surely have been able to put enough pressure on the government to make this happen. But instead zelensky kept repeating the talking points that we should not be concerned about the war because the risk had not changed since 2014. Near-zero effort was made to evacuate ukrainians living near the russian border or those who would be in the way of russian troops. The intelligence had been there for at least six months before the war began
> and the government was already struggling with making a law at all
Only if you ignore free will. Feels unlikely that women will suddenly abandon monogamy and forced procreation à la the draft is probably very unpopular especially given that women would be a majority. Not that they’re wrong to disagree, but there are more conditions here than the biology of procreation.
The modern answer would be immigration, and that’s gender-agnostic.
that argument is uninformed, check the birth rate in ukraine
also check who are these refugees abroad: mostly women and children. How many will return? No one knows. Also what’s the incentive for women to return knowing there are far less options to marry?
who will be working hard jobs where men are prevalent?
what about the current generation? Who will be rebuilding the country from ruins? I’ve never seen women working in construction in ukraine
also this is cynical, your position assumes it’s either men or women, not sharing the military service duty
go learn the history and then come here to comment on the matter
> that argument is uninformed, check the birth rate in ukraine
This has long been the argument for a male-only draft.
One woman can make 1-2 babies every 9 months on average. It is difficult and expensive to speed that up; you can implant quadruplets and induce labor at six months, but that introduces all sorts of other problems. Sperm is much easier to obtain.
> who will be working hard jobs where men are prevalent?
Women, if too many men die in the war.
> I’ve never seen women working in construction in ukraine
This was also the case for the US in the 1940s. Women entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time. Plenty of predecent for this sort of shift.
> go learn the history and then come here to comment on the matter
As you can see from the above, this is perhaps advice you should follow first before yelling at others.
Hard to feel the same sympathy for Russian men to be honest, I've seen many gallivanting abroad, whilst majority of Ukrainian men are stuck either in hiding in their own country or have been sent to the front lines. Only a few got out early or by paying bribes.
honestly i am happy for the russian and ukranian young men and women i meet here in NL each day. Glad for them they can dodge the draft. most simply drove out, some had more hastle than others.
war is shit on all sides and thinking one or the other suffers less because you dont like their colours is very short sighted.... i think we had enough time by now to realise it.
and dont call it cowardice if someone doesnt want to fight for a bunch of 'rich pricks' playin with their money while normal people get to die in the streets. It has never been good or normal and should never be.
It's objectively worse on the Ukrainian side. Imagine you haven't been able to leave your house in 4 years for fear you'll be grabbed by a draft officer. Russians do not know this fear.
To boot, many Russian men have been paid handsomely for their participation in the SMO and get to live nice lives abroad.
Did you just forget about the mobilization drive Russia had in 2022, where they grabbed young men off streets and from their houses?
It was very unpopular, lead to people fleeing the country, and was pushed out of the public eye as soon as they figured out how to forcefully volunteer people instead.
Nobody grabbed anyone. It was an unusual, but otherwise a normal bureaucratic process. Got handed a paper, signed, have to appear. Many probably didn't have plans to go voluntarily, but felt it unmanly to dodge. I was at one of such sites and saw a man who got there too drunk and was handed over to the police; he was very disappointed he is not allowed go with the fellas.
It wasn't hard to dodge; you could just refuse to take the papers pretending it's not you or get sick the very day or something like that. The system had a number and once it was reached (very quickly) no further action was necessary. The only change so far us that the employers started to follow their military tracking procedure to the letter; before that it was required but not really enforced, but now all the paperwork gets done by the book.
Some people indeed left the country but those are the kind you don't want to have your back anyway.
Forceful volunteering is pure imagination. At most it's intensive persuasion or a new way to get out of jail, but if you don't want to go, nobody will force you.
It's not like it's zero-sum though; the world outside Russia and as Ukraine isn't going to become so full that there's no room for more or them to leave to dodge fighting in a war, so the parent commenter can easily be happy for any of them regardless of their country of origin.
The men I know try not to go unless it's absolutely necessary. The women generally prance to Russia and back all the time. (Exceptions exist, of course.)
But the UN DHR doesn’t seem to have been written as law. It was written as a declaration, in line with our own Declaration of Independence. It lists our ideals that need to be spelled into law. That lets it be airy and vague in a way laws cannot.
It isn’t “every law.” It’s not written to be directly operationalised. You’re comparing a declaration of values to operational law; they’re words in different ways and contexts.
> Is a "declaration of values" more than words if there is no power that is willing to enforce it?
Yes. Nobody directly enforces the policy papers or the Declaration of Independence. That doesn’t mean they don’t have corporeal value. In part, due to being translated into laws.
Almost everything about societies except cities is just pretty words. Countries and most borders are just an abstraction. We fight for them because someone convinces us with words to do so. We could do the same for the UN and it would be a much nobler cause in most cases.
That doesn't turn it into a physical reality like a stone or a stream of water that exists regardless of what animals think about it. Territories exist because they are defended. They are not obvious unless one deals with the means employed to defend it.
The need to defend might be a necessity for survival, but the desire to defend additional territory and resources has existed ever since humans have acquired the power to achieve more than the means of mere survival. Similar to food preferences, which become peculiar if there is plentitude, basic if tight, and sub-par in emergencies: during famines, sometimes people resort to eat grass to sate their feeling of hunger even though digesting it is an energetic net negative.
First of all you don't need it. Secondly, the regulation even states that the right is granted automatically anyway. Technically, the rule had been in place for the past 45+ years anyway - even when there was mandatory military service! - so it doesn't make any practical difference.
> Apparently it is bureaucracy without purpose after all?
No it's not without purpose at all. The purpose is to know who could be drafted in a timely manner should the need arise. There's currently 2 major wars - sorry "special military operations" - happening, one of which in Europe.
A certain government involved in one of these simultaneously calls for allies to assist while at the same time openly questioning half a century of military alliances. So maybe this helps to understand why regulations like this make sense - even for people who never lived through a time when there was mandatory military service and take their own security for granted.
At the moment, the law has no teeth since they cannot stop anyone from just leaving without return ticket, and nothing happens when you return. Of course it would be very easy to change that, and that's the reason why it exists.
I can see both sides of it though. The old rule made more sense when companies ipo’d at small valuations. It could be argued it’s wrong to keep one the top five market cap companies off the sp500 for a year.
It's because they're natively trained with 1 bit, so it's not losing anything. Now, the question might be how they manage to get decent predictive performance with such little precision. That I don't know.
In theory you do lose information compared to parameters with more bits.
In practice, neural networks aren't able to store much more than 2-4 bits of useful information per parameter (regardless of the precision), so models like this are mostly getting rid of redundancy.
I always remind myself and everyone else that human DNA is "only" 1.6 GB of data, and yet it encodes all of the complex systems of the human body including the brain, and can replicate itself. Our intuitive feel of how much stuff can be packed into how many bits are probably way off from the true limits of physics.
For now, the DNA replication and the synthesis of RNA and proteins using the information stored in DNA are the best understood parts about how a cell grows and divides, but how other complex cellular structures, e.g. membranes or non-ribosomal peptides, are assembled and replicated is much less understood.
We need more years of research, perhaps up to a decade or two, until we will be able to know the entire amount of information describing a simple bacterial cell, and perhaps more than that for a much more complex eukaryotic cell.
Human DNA has 3.2 billion base pairs, and with 2x the information density compared to binary systems (due to 4-letters as opposed 2), that's roughly 800MB of informational data.
Second, what's even more crazy is that roughly 98% of that DNA is actually non-coding.. just junk.
So, we are talking about encoding entirety of the logic to construct a human body in just around 16MB of data!!!
That's some crazy levels of recursive compression.. maybe it's embedding "varying" parsing logic, mixed with data, along the chain.
As another poster has said, much of the "junk" is not junk.
The parts of the DNA with known functions encode either proteins or RNA molecules, being templates for their synthesis.
The parts with unknown functions include some amount of true junk caused by various historical accidents that have been replicated continuously until now, but they also include a lot of DNA that seems to have a role in controlling how the protein or RNA genes are expressed (i.e. turning off or on the synthesis of specific proteins or RNAs), by mechanisms not well understood yet.
It encodes the data on top of locally optimal trajectories in the physical world that were learned in millions of years of evolution. Treat this as context, not weights.
Just vanilla JS unless you've got prior experience because any engine you use is going to have a setup process and bootstrapping code and a learning curve for you that will eat into your time. Across the weekend you might only really have a few hours to dedicate to this project and to hold their attention.
Using the "memory" game as an example, do you want the problems you solve to be how to shuffle the cards in a random order, or do you want to be solving why the cards all positioned weirdly because PhaserJS defines an anchor "origin" point in objects and by default that's x 0.5 / y 0.5 which means 50% width / 50% height aka the center of the object so you need to either set their origin to x 0 / y 0 or factor that into their position by subtracting half their width and height, and their width and height has scaled and unscaled values too width vs displayWidth... and of course if you're using a group for the card's display objects, that class does not support setting the origin.
It seems like most breakthroughs I see are for efficiency? What are the most importsnt breakthroughs from the past two or three years for intelligence?
If you think of it from the point of view of the universal approximation theorem, it's all efficiency optimisation. We know that it works if we do it incredibly inefficiently.
Every architecture improvement is essentially a way to achieve the capability of a single fully-connected hidden layer network n wide. With fewer parameters.
Given these architectures usually still contain fully connected layers, unless they've done something really wrong, they should still be able to do anything if you make the entire thing large enough.
That means a large enough [insert model architecture] will be able to approximate any function to arbitrary precision. As long as the efficiency gains with the architecture are retained as the scale increases they should be able to get there quicker.
Most breakthroughs that are published are for efficiency because most breakthroughs that are published are for open source.'
All the foundation model breakthroughs are hoarded by the labs doing the pretraining. That being said, RL reasoning training is the obvious and largest breakthrough for intelligence in recent years.
With all the floating around of AI researchers though, I kind of wonder how "secret" all these secrets are. I'm sure they have internal siloing, but even still, big players seem to regularly defect to other labs. On top of this, all the labs seem to be pretty neck and neck, with no one clearly pulling ahead across the board.
> What are the most importsnt breakthroughs from the past two or three years for intelligence?
The most important one in that timeframe was clearly reasoning/RLVR (reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards), which was pioneered by OpenAI's Q* aka Strawberry aka o1.
I’m confused why the hype and the investment got so high. And why everyone treats it like a race. Why can’t we gradually develop it like dna sequencing.
To be fair, DNA sequencing was very hyped up (although not nearly as much as AI). The HGP finished two years ahead of schedule, which is sort of unheard of for something in it's domain, and was mainly a result of massive public interest about personalized medicine and the like. I will admit that a ton of foundational DNA sequencing stuff evolved over decades, but the massive leap forward in the early 2000s is comparable to the LLM hype now.
I assumed it was obvious. Being first is all that matters. Investors don't want to invest in second place. Obviously, first is achieving AGI and not some GPT bot. That's why so many people keep saying AGI is in _____ weeks away with some even being preposterous stating AGI might have already happened. They need to keep attracting investors. Same as Musk constantly saying FSD is ____ weeks away.
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