• 0 Posts
  • 402 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’m not at all denying Racism in Portugal.

    I’m denying Racist Hate, even back in Fascist times: people were prejudiced about those in the “colonies” and even looked down on them but they didn’t at all hate them.

    People did (and still do, though less) go around with all sorts of prejudices about different looking people or people from other places, especially “Colorism” (though, curiously, in present day Portugal it’s more the Brazilians that are discriminated against than people with Black African ancestry).

    My point is that even during Fascism and the peak of the wars of liberation against Portugal in the “colonies” people didn’t went around thinking that “Africans are human animals” or that “we should wipe them out” and ditto for the figures of the Regime, whilst the shit coming out of Israel and especially from the mouths of Ministers and politicians of the governing coalition is relentlessly racist and some form or other of mass murder are common suggested as “solutions” for the “Palestinian problem”.

    That level of extreme hate along racial lines is simply not the kind of thing traditional Fascism tries to indoctrinate into the population, whilst it’s the core of ethno-Fascism and its Propaganda.

    This is far from a “just Portugal” kind of thing: even the most violent traditional Fascist dictatorship - that of Franco in Spain - didn’t engage in widespread violence against different ethnic groups (or, in fact, in any kind of “white supremacy” ideas) and its violence was mainly the period of Civil War at its start, which pitched mainly Spaniards against Spaniards.

    I mean, if you want a present day example of traditional Fascist violence, just look at Russia in Ukraine: they’re mostly trying to take Ukrainian shit and have the Ukrainians become Russians and work for the Russian regime, not to wipe them out in Ukraine. The violence is because the Ukrainians naturally refuse and there are certainly atrocities in war by the Russians and even vengeance against civilians using missiles following Russian defeats, and that’s it. There is no such thing as a campaign to get rid of Ukrainians in by any means necessary no matter how murderous.

    Absolutely, that too is evil shit. It’s however more of a nation state version of Theft and Pillaging whilst what the Zionists and other ethno-Fascists do is Extermination, a whole different level of Evil.


  • I’m Portuguese a country which had a Fascist dictatorship until 74.

    I was very young at the time and don’t remember anything of the dictatorship directly but did heard the stories and saw what came out of it.

    The country was definitely colonialist and the people and natural resources of the “colonies” (which were all in Africa) were definitely being exploited but there was no messaging of racial superiority and no racist hate even when the people over there started rebelling and there was war. In fact so little was the racist indoctrination that immediately after the Revolution all “colonies” were left to gain their independence as nations and all of them became friendly nations with democratic Portugal within a few years.

    From all I’ve seen the focus of the Fascist propaganda was all about the Greatness Of Portugal (all the while it was a shithole) especially old “greatness” like the various achievements of the Portuguese during the time of the Maritime Discoveries in the 15th and 16th centuries.

    That shit is nowhere near what Nazis and Zionists do and even during the wars of liberation of Portuguese colonies there was never any mass targeting of civilians over there, much less a systematic massacre and a long list of babies murdered by the Portuguese Military.

    As soon as racial supremacy and racist hate gets into the picture, even in war you go from an atrocity here and there generally done remotely (as you see Russia do in Ukraine) to systematic massacres with snipers seeing children through their scopes and choosing to shoot them in their heads (as you see Israel do in Palestine) - traditional Fascism has Sociopaths leading the military, ethno-Fascism has the entire military all the way down to privates acting as Sociopaths.


  • Thanks for that very complete view of things.

    Things are quite different since I last was doing hiring, which was pre-COVID.

    Yeah, my experience leading a remoted team in India also showed the importance of cultural awareness and good requirements: I ultimately got into the habit of, after the big meeting with the boss were all the work was given to the various teams, get my guys individually on the phone (so that they feared not “losing face”) and carefully coach out of them any questions or doubts since otherwise they wouldn’t voice them and just end up implementing something they misunderstood or which wasn’t explained correctly and indeed they also needed very detailed requirements which was a problem because the senior guys on the other side who ended up having to write said requirements could pretty much have done the job themselves in that time.

    This was a big Investment Bank and some top level manager in NY decided to create a division in India to outsource work to, but it definitely didn’t get the cream of the crop over there and the career structuring there was so shit that the few good techies we got would quickly end up as (bad) managers - their pay scales followed the stupid idea that “nobody can be paid more than management” so good mid level techies had to become junior managers to earn more, and they invariably were crap as managers.



  • Just a small correction: this is not just plain Fascism, it’s ethno-Fascism (like the Nazis), a far more violent and derranged variant than traditional Fascism because it’s anchored on Ethnicity, feelings of Ethnic Superiority and the ultra racist casting of entire other ethnicities as sub-human (i.e übermenschen vs untermenschen or, as the Israeli leadership calls them, “human animals”) whilst the traditional kind (such as Mussolini’s) is anchored on Nationalism.

    Traditional Fascism being based “merely” on Nationalism does have the capacity to inspire their people to such massive levels of cold sociopathic violence against entire groups of people as ethno-Fascism does.

    Or, more in general, extreme racists are far more irrationally violent than mere thieves.


  • It’s a pretty standard technique of ethno-Fascists: the Zionists, just like the Nazis did, claim to represent an entire ethnicity and then cast any criticism of them and their ultra-racist Genocide as being criticism of that ethnicity they claim to represent.

    And this is hardly the only propaganda technique Zionists and Nazis have in common: most of the tricks the Zionists use are pretty much Nazi shit with just the names of the ethnicities, places and nations replaced, down to how a lot of what the Zionists claim about Palestinians in Gaza being pretty much what the Nazis claimed about the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.




  • Well, I was just an immigrant in the place for a bit over a decade.

    Still, having seen first hand the long term consequences of the purest expression of her and Reagan’s ideology (that shit also got copied all over Europe, including my own country, but in a diluted form), pure hate for Thatcher was one of those things I quickly learned from Common Britons and took into my heart.

    The West has been fucked by that shit but I got the impression that the US and the UK got especially fucked and endured (and still are enduring) a much larger fall because of it.






  • One of the first things they teach you in Experimental Physics is that you can’t derive a curve from just 2 data points.

    You can just as easilly fit an exponential growth curve to 2 points like that one 20% above the other, as you can a a sinusoidal curve, a linear one, an inverse square curve (that actually grows to a peak and then eventually goes down again) and any of the many curves were growth has ever diminishing returns and can’t go beyond a certain point (literally “with a limit”)

    I think the point that many are making is that LLM growth in precision is the latter kind of curve: growing but ever slower and tending to a limit which is much less than 100%. It might even be like more like the inverse square one (in that it might actually go down) if the output of LLM models ends up poluting the training sets of the models, which is a real risk.

    You showing that there was some growth between two versions of GPT (so, 2 data points, a before and an after) doesn’t disprove this hypotesis. I doesn’t prove it either: as I said, 2 data points aren’t enough to derive a curve.

    If you do look at the past growth of precision for LLMs, whilst improvement is still happening, the rate of improvement has been going down, which does support the idea that there is a limit to how good they can get.





  • Same principle as a gyroscope: a turning wheel will tend to stay perpendicular or parallel to the direction of the gravity vector because if it starts tilting away from such orientation there’s a force that pushes it back.

    Also works better with bigger wheels (if I remember it correctly the effect is related to spinning momentum).

    I was pretty surprised when learning Physics and they show us how to derive the formula for that (which I totally forgot since that was over 3 decades ago).

    Edit: Actually the gyroscopic effetc is just a part of it. See this article



  • Just because they share the same religion doesn’t mean they’re the same kind of people.

    That bunch in Israel have even accused a Holocaust Survivor of being an anti-semite for criticizing Israel, and most modern Israelis did not came from Western Europe. Most of them they share no other characteristic with the victims of the Holocaust than religious affiliation, certainly not being against racism or having other modern humanist values.