Image is of a harbor in Tasiilak, Greenland.
NATO infighting? You love to see it, folks.
The latest incident of America's satrapies becoming increasingly unhappy about their mandated kowtowing involves, of all places, Greenland. As I'm sure most people here are aware, Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark with a degree of geopolitical and economic importance - the former due to its proximity to Russia, and the latter due to the proven and potential reserves of minerals that could be mined there. It's also been an odd fascination of Trump during his reign, now culminating in outright demands.
Trump has called for negotiations with Denmark to purchase Greenland, justifying this by stating that it would be safer from Russia and China under America's protection. Apparently, Norway's decision to not give him the Nobel Peace Prize further inflamed him (not that the Norweigan government decides who receives the prizes). He has also said that countries that do not allow him to make the decision - which not only includes Denmark, but also other European countries - will suffer increased tariffs by June, and that he has not ruled out a military solution.
This threat has led to much internal bickering inside the West, with European leaders stating they will not give in to Trump's demands, and even sending small numbers of troops to Greenland. The most bizarre part of this whole affair is that the US already basically has total military access and control over Greenland anyway, and has since the 1950s, when they signed an agreement with Denmark. There are already several US military facilities on Greenland, and B-52 bombers have famously flown in the vicinity of the island (and crashed into it with nuclear bombs in tow, in fact). Therefore, this whole event - in line with his all-performance, little-results presidency so far - seems to be largely about the theatrics of forcing the Europeans to continue to submit to his whims. I would not be surprised if they ultimately do sign a very imbalanced deal, though - the current European leadership is bound too tightly to the US to put up even half-hearted resistance.
This is all simultaneously occurring alongside the Canadian Prime Minister's visit to China in which longstanding sore spots in their bilateral relationship are being addressed, with China reducing tariffs on Canadian canola oilseeds, and Canada reducing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, as well as currency swaps between their central banks, among many other things. It seems no accident that Canada's reconsideration of their relationship with China is occurring as Trump has made remarks about turning Canada into the next US state, as well as the demand for the renegotiation of the USMCA.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
DeepSeek is still stochastic and fundamentally based on creating plausible natural language. It can't actually think about the correctness of the information it's providing healthcare workers to make clinical decisions, it's a predictive text machine. They really are just using the wrong tool for the job, even if it's improving metrics it's a mistake.
You can just write "Stupid Chinese" instead if thats what you believe.
Look, I'm sure that it's somewhat useful to have DeepSeek help in some of the menial tasks involved in running a hospital and I don't doubt that China has an economic and political system that's inherently quite good at being dynamic about using new technologies. I'm not criticizing them in general. But you can read the article you linked and see how it shows they're using DeepSeek to help make clinical decisions and you can research how an LLM works to see why I'm saying what I'm saying, it's not a machine that's appropriate for that task.
This is in the abstract. They are identifying weaknesses while also not outright rejecting a technology that is clearly providing some benefit.
I just dont think it is reasonable to blanket criticize a technology and also to assume that the professionals in China and the regulatory bodies are not aware of its limitations.
I would be interested in what is being done and learning more about how it is being used.
I am frustrated because we cannot even get to the stage of curiosity and discovery in a conversation instead stuck at the premise.
I don't assume that at all, I'm sure they're aware and I'm sure the people in China who understand that LLMs are stochastic text generation engines are fighting this, while the companies with something to sell are going to come up with some language that can dress the problem at the heart of this issue. You can say that LLMs are getting all these multimodal tools to take more data into account and that the ethical concerns are being worked out, it doesn't nullify the contradiction in the middle.
LLMs are not artificial intelligence. AI is a hype term that's inappropriate in this context. You can't expect an LLM to assist doctors to do their jobs beyond doing clerical work (a task where it's still liable to hallucinate and get important information wrong, but failure is more easily detected and shouldn't directly lead to a poor outcome for a patient) because LLMs are incapable of presenting information to a user with fidelity; that's a task that's better served by a search engine that can actually direct you to the source of the information directly, not a stochastic text predictor that can sometimes mix in data from unrelated sources.
I can't think of why LLMs are better suited at helping a healthcare worker than a search engine, unless you value having short answers quickly much higher than having correct answers (and most LLMs give long, redundant answers to simple questions anyway because they start telling you how smart you are). I can't think of why you'd use them to do any task that requires analysis, research, or cross examining sources in general. They can't do those things, they exist to take a text prompt and write a response that sounds plausible.
I can't say I've talked with any Chinese healthcare workers but tech companies all around the world have been pushing their workers to use LLM tools to aid their efficiency in a context that's arguably more suitable for the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs (easy to catch bugs with tests, purely text based, already millions of repositories to train a model on, it's the domain of the companies making the models so they're better equipped to tailor their models for that task) and I have yet to meet any developer who actually thinks it's good for production code. Maybe it's good for prototyping and toy scripts. That's the most glowing praise I've heard.
I understand this, the technology is just a word bucket not magic.
LLM's are clearly an incredibly powerful technology. The americans are developing it to find new ways of extermination an capital accumulation.
Non-imperialist powers are developing it to defend their sovereignty and that threatens the imperial order. Why else did the zionists specifically assasinate) Iran experts in the field? The Islamic Republic is integrating large language models in order to improve agricultural yields in the face of climate change induced crop failures.
Use generative AI, dont use it, I dont care. I guarantee you that many hypocrites in this thread themselves use LLM while they rail against it. (Congratulations if you use Google search you gave genocidegemini your data.)
But if you use LLM I am saying then use a Chinese model so your data doesn't support israel. Thats my entire point here.
Instead we can't have a conversation without the same talking point being repeated. And people default back to using Gemini or whatever else is readily available.
This entire thread has left a very nasty taste in my mouth.
I agree on both counts, but you may be overstating the actual capacity of the LLMs. They're incredibly powerful at manipulation because of how much propaganda they can pump out and how much more convincing they are than the previous generation of chatbot technology. They're also useful for weaponizing surveilance tech against large populations because, while faulty compared to having humans do the job, they're good enough to listen in on millions of people's conversations to aid in exterminating them (i.e. how they've been deployed by the Zionists as you say).
I think in that context LLMs are really just for psychological warfare, which doesn't really have anything to do with using them to do research or analyze something. The article you linked on Iran using AI for farming didn't load so I checked out a PressTV article on the same topic; they're really just modernizing farming with a suite of different technologies that include LLMs but also drones and IoT. I'm not gonna comment on how effective I suspect the LLMs are gonna be for growing and harvesting crops, but I guess maybe they save some time for writing the code for the other stuff? Again, this doesn't convince me that LLMs should be used to analyze information.
If your point is that using Chinese LLMs is better than using the American ones I don't disagree at all. I haven't been using LLMs for a bit but I switched to DeepSeek once it came out, that's why I'm confident when I say it's not fundamentally different and still makes the same kinds of hallucination mistakes. I'm sorry the conversation went this way, I think it was a pretty bad vibe seeing someone who has good analysis here talking about how they use an LLM, I imagine the reason you've had several people frustrated at you has nothing to do with whether the LLM is from Alibaba and more with how much AI slop fills up everywhere else online.
Knee-jerk moralizing