Zuzak

I gotta push back against the criticism that several of my comrades in here are expressing. Y'all are talking about the US collaborating with Nazis after the war, and you're not wrong about that, but that was the US government, while this meme is about a soldier. The soldiers on the ground fought for all sorts of reasons, they might have opposed the Nazis for all sorts of ideological reasons, or they might have just been doing it out of loyalty, or any of the other reasons soldiers fight. But there were people on the ground fighting the Nazis under a US flag who were committed antifascists and even communists. As for the others, whatever their reasons, when the call came to save the world from fascism, they answered, and were willing to sacrifice life and limb to do it. That's pretty heroic if you ask me. And they weren't the ones who made the decision to let Nazis into NATO and stuff afterwards.

I understand the defensiveness against attempts to glorify the US while villifying the USSR and downplay their (more substantial) sacrifice and contribution to the war. But there's nothing in this meme that's doing that, and there were Americans who contributed to the war effort. Is it necessary to kneejerk react to a meme celebrating someone who fought the Nazis by talking about the government that ruled over them? People aren't defined by their nation or their government.

Let's not forget the proud tradition of people like Woody Guthrie, who explicitly tied the war effort to a broader idea of antifascism, nor of the people on the front lines who he inspired.

No offense, but you're wrong about this.

Machine learning does have valid use cases, and chess (and go and other board games) is one of them. The thing about chess is that there's a definitive win state that the AI is trying to reach. This is a huge difference from language and image models, which require human input to tell them if they're any good or not, and feeding the output back into it makes it more and more gibberish. With chess AI, the goal isn't to play like a human, but to win, which means it can judge it's own output against that metric and train off of that, with no need for human games at all. You can start it off playing random nonsense moves, and then let it run, and it'll play millions of games getting a little better with each one, as fast as the hardware allows. The end result is something much, much better than what any human or brute force algorithm can achieve. Speaking as a go player, AI has completely revolutionized the way we play the game, and I believe the chess world has had a similar experience.

Having said that, there have been some problems with go AI. A while back, somebody discovered a trick that anybody could use to beat otherwise unbeatable AI. It involved intentionally letting a group get surrounded with no way to live, and then surrounding the group surrounding that group in order to kill it. It was a nonsense strategy that any human player would catch on to and subvert, but because it was a bad strategy, the AI never tried it and so it wasn't in its training data. This served as an important reminder that the AI isn't perfect and isn't actually thinking.

However, without exploits like that, nobody, not even the top professionals, have any chance whatsoever of beating a top AI. And that only started being the case with go relatively recently, because the brute force algorithms weren't good enough but the machine learning algorithms were a huge leap forward, and they're getting better and better.

I'm as much of an AI skeptic as the next person, but a W is a W.

If I say, "Knight to B4," does that sound like something a person playing chess might say? Then it did it's job.

Think of an LLM as an actor. You don't hire someone to act as a grandmaster in a movie based on their skill at chess, they might not even know how to play, but if they deliver the lines in a convincing way, that's what you're looking for. There's chess AIs that are incredibly good at chess, because that's what they're designed for and trained on. That's why this is a very silly test, it's like testing a fish on its tree-climbing ability, the only thing sillier than this test is that people are surprised by it.

I think Rebels Thrawn does him as much justice as you could reasonably expect from a kids' show.

Well... there is a more generous interpretation, but I'm not sure how valid it is.

Palpatine created the clone army and then used the separatists to manufacture a threat that would cause the Republic to accept it. This was an integral part of his plan, it allowed him to kill all the Jedi and consolidate power, because the clones were trained to know nothing but battle and to blindly follow orders. "How does a republic turn to fascism?" is a question that the prequels seem to want to answer, and the clone army is part of that.

The most generous interpretation would say that the movies intentionally lead the audience on to accepting the Republic as the good guys and the clone army as necessary, and then shows that leading to disastrous results with the aim of prompting the audience to reflect on their willingness to accept the militarization of the Republic as a good/necessary thing.

However, if that's the idea, the execution is pretty questionable. It's never really made clear who should've done what differently to prevent Palpatine's rise to power. Padme has a line in Ep. 3, "Do you ever wonder if we might be fighting for the wrong side?" But the other side is also being manipulated by the same guy, and even if the Republic were to resist militarization and offer negotiations and diplomacy, Palpatine would probably just get the Separatists to push further in order to create the threat he needed. The writers seem to think it's enough to provide foreshadowing, rather than presenting actual alternatives.

A better version of the prequels would have clearly established a couple of things: 1. Palpatine's influence over the separatists is not absolute, and they are open to peaceful negotiations, 2. At least somebody (like Padme) is clearly critical and opposed to the Republic's militarization and the use of clones from the start, 3. The Jedi are not ontologically good, and/or have significant disagreements with the Republic, the war, and the use of clones. If those things were established and clearly communicated, then what we have is a story of a fascist using a manufactured/exaggerated threat to justify the controversial creation of a massive military accountable only to himself, while well-meaning people (the Jedi) struggle with the question of at what point should they stop being loyal to a government moving in an increasingly worrying direction. Instead, it really just comes down to the classic lib narrative about Hitler's magical ~~force powers~~ charisma enchanting everyone.

On the one hand it's not a great sign about which way the winds are blowing, but on the other hand my mind is just so much more at ease not seeing the cursed pride logos of Raytheon and the Pinkertons.

Magneto.

Huh, I woulda thought People would be about, you know, people, and yet, no one mentioned in that article is a person.

Mao had just said, "uhh the state is an oppressive institution so now we'll just dismantle everything and y'all can just organize horizontally or whatever."

The funny thing is, he kinda did. The result was these roving, undisciplined militias calling themselves Red Guards and holding (actual) struggle sessions and killing each other, and committing a bunch of atrocities.

I know there were actual historical reasons but I like to imagine that one day Mao somehow got possessed by a redditor and started doing what any "anti-tankie" would say he should do, denouncing the government as having fallen to bourgeois opportunists and calling on the people to rise up in this structureless, "anti-authoritarian" way. But since the outcome was bad, it's of course, "No, not like that."

GermaNazi

All we have to do is nuke them, and we'll be greeted as liberators