The international "rules-based order" is a good idea when most nations play by the rules most of the time, and when the most powerful at least pretend to follow the same rules as everyone else.
A world order based on rules makes it possible to live at a much higher level of abstraction.
Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly just figments of collective belief. But these wispy and unreal ideas that everyone believes in make it possible for most people to live longer, healthier and less difficult lives.
The "rules-based order" was always partly mythical, but as long as everyone kept pretending, it mostly continued to function.
But when we devolve from the rules-based order to the old order of pure power and might-makes-right, kings and dictators, when there's no more collective belief that the rules apply to the rich and powerful, then the tower of abstractions collapses, and we're back to the cold, hard, brutal and difficult real world.
People will find out that life in the real world is a lot poorer and more miserable than life at the top of the tower of abstractions, even if your brokerage account appears to double.
I generally agree with your comment except the 'back to the real world' part. This is just the difference between a world with the gains that cooperation give verses a world with just the maximized minimum return that distrust leads to. A trusting world is the real world we have seen for decades. It is a real world we can choose to keep pushing for.
Neither is 'real'. The power of might depends on belief just as much as the power of rules. You need a whole lot of compliance, even when forced by fear and terror, to just keep up a police state. The belief consists of where people think other people assign authority to, at large. But that can be just as brittle as a meme stock if the time is right.
Social reality is always constructed. No single construction is more real than any other.
In practice the US could already do whatever it wanted in Greenland/Canada etc. The options for the motivation behind the theatrics I see.
1. Instill fear in the vassals->support for militarization rises there->they become more useable as proxies against RF/China
2. Just another Trump silliness
The rules based order is mostly a fabrication of recent history. Perhaps between the fall of the Soviet Union, China becoming more open, and the general peace and prosperity it seemed like it existed.
Politics between countries has always been around interests. Countries have no interest in giving up their sovereignty. They may pretend to respect these "rules" when it suits them and then ignore them when it doesn't. Everyone is focused on how "bad" the US is but a) the US has always more or less done whatever it wants b) Russia and China (and many others) have never even pretended to play or accept these "rules".
Canada's Carney whines about "international order" when just a few years ago China simply abducted Canadians in response to the supposed "orderly" arrest of the Huawei CFO to be extradited to the US. So Canada basically abducts the CFO of a major Chinese company and China abducts Canadians in retaliation and that's a rules based order to who exactly? And we can put together an endless list of an endless number of countries. So when exactly was there ever a rules based order except as a tool for countries to bully each other and for the poorer dictator led countries to try and get a seat at the table because they can vote in the UN general assembly.
> Russia and China (and many others) have never even pretended to play or accept these "rules".
This false. They have pretended to play by the rules, and when breaking them, to at least manufacture some pretext, or to deny it was a state activity at all.
One example I can give you is that when invading Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Union convinced a few Czechoslovak politicians to write a letter inviting the forces for "brotherly help", thus manufacturing a case that it's not really an invasion. They didn't have to do it, the force differential was overwhelming, but they did it because they could point at the letter on international stage.
All this may seem a bit pointless but binding them in international structures brought interesting fruit in the wake of Helsinki conference on human rights. After that they were forced to at least somewhat follow the signed documents which lead to significantly better conditions to dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. And there are many examples like this, when pointing at international rules actually made things better. So let's not throw that away.
Incorrect. The rules based order was first attempted after the first world war and then created after the second one. These are lessen that have been bought with blood. Lots of blood. Megaliters of it. The incredible stupidity of throwing that away is absolutely disgusting.
I acknowledge that the 20th century was marked by much bloodshed, but this wasn't limited to the world wars and it continues violently into the 21st century.
If the world is governed by rules, why does the United States maintain a considerable number of military bases around the world, far exceeding the total number of military bases of all other countries combined?
Why is the American military budget so much higher than the combined military budgets of all other countries?
The "rules-based international order" was a fiction popularized by US policy makers who wanted to quietly substitute it for international law, so they could violate said laws, while still vaguely gesturing at moral authority.
"In the 1940s through the 1970s, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and decolonisation across the world resulted in the establishment of scores of newly independent states.[67] As these former colonies became their own states, they adopted European views of international law.[68] A flurry of institutions, ranging from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) to the World Health Organization furthered the development of a multilateralist approach as states chose to compromise on sovereignty to benefit from international cooperation.[69] Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing focus on the phenomenon of globalisation and on protecting human rights on the global scale, particularly when minorities or indigenous communities are involved, as concerns are raised that globalisation may be increasing inequality in the international legal system.[70]"
Laws aren't fictitious just because people/countries break them. No one writes a law thinking "that settles that, no more embezzling." Laws simply tell you how that system works: you embezzle, FBI arrests you, you get tried, etc.
Also the US always made a big deal about not joining various treaties, with their reasoning explicitly being "we actually plan to do a lot of things that would violate that treaty." In that sense, that shows the US actually had respect for those institutions.
Also, the west benefited from this arrangement. Most western countries could benefit from the rules based order, and when they needed a little pump, the US broke some rules and brought home a treat for the home team. You might argue this undermines the whole enterprise, but my counterargument is this is the longest period of relative peace and prosperity humankind has ever experienced, so although it wasn't perfect, it was a huge improvement.
Whether or not a 'LIO' exists is not that interesting to me. What is interesting is what actually exists and what has happened in history. What actually exists is an enormous shock after, for instance, world war one where the question arose how it is possible that basically an entire generation of young men was slaughtered. E.g., every small village in France has a memorial of the fallen soldiers during world war one. For many decades after the war commemoration were/are still being held. It used to be that competing for territory was just the normal thing countries did. Then, it became clear that this has a potentially enormous cost in human lives. The obvious conclusion for people who are not sleepwalking through life and through history, is that any political leader who advocates for a change in country borders and does so much as hint to violent means of doing so is totally deranged and immoral. A similar shock has gone through the world after world war two, which, for instance, lead to the creation of the declaration of universal human rights. Among the decent public, it is also concluded that a violation of human rights is deranged in immoral.
> Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly just figments of collective belief.
> But when we devolve from the rules-based order to the old order of pure power and might-makes-right, kings and dictators, when there's no more collective belief that the rules apply to the rich and powerful, then the tower of abstractions collapses, and we're back to the cold, hard, brutal and difficult real world.
Many have absorbed and believe the argument of the might-makes-right crowd that their vision is 'real' and their enemies' vision is 'imaginary'. Unless people believe in what they seek, they are lost.
There's nothing imaginary about it; that theory is paper thin and doesn't survive simple examination. Obviously, humans are social animals that live in groups, have powerful intellects, and therefore have tremendous ability to cooperate and work together toward greater good; we've done it many, many times. Freedom and democracy have appealed powerfully to people worldwide, in a tremendously wide variety of cultures. That model was created by people who had experienced WWI and WWII; they knew more of your 'reality' than probably you or I ever will, and with that knowledge and experience they created this order.
And the greater good long predates that; religions and similar ethical codes based on the greater good long predate modern democracy and the rules-based order. Rules-based orders predate it. The Gospels in the New Testament are an easy, very familiar example, from 2,000 years ago (and a significant basis of modern freedom and democracy). Similar is true for abstractions like law, government, justice, etc.
We all are biologically the same, essentially, as the best of humanity and the worst - both are in all of us. It's our choice, our moral choice, what we do. That is also a fundamental that long predates the post-war order, democracy, the Englightenment, etc. Inevitability is a cheap tactic long used by those whose ideas are undesireable and don't withstand scrutiny.
Our choice is easier than those who survived WWII, and their predecessors. Our ancestors gave us the tools, the institutions, etc. They had to build them from nothing for a skeptical world.
The source of truth in fascism is not popular support or inquiry, thus they always need to channel some privileged connection to reality, or claim to voice the true will of the people and authentically represents the pure will of the nation.
Its a farce, of course, but one that can sometimes muster enough support to keep the signs in the shop with just a bit of intimidation and violence to back it up.
I dislike the saying "the devil's in the details". It is the inverse of where the devil actually thrives - in the clever abstractions.
The beasts who rule this world are the banksters and their vast bureaucratic thrall. Their failing is these rulers have huffed their own degenerate anti-human messages for the past 75 years, have become deranged themselves, and now they've lost their attractiveness and persuasive power.
See what's gone almost completely by the wayside in their green agenda and lgbtqia+4g message as they struggle to cope and maintain their grip. Public, centralized AI is their great hope for control, but it won't survive the lawsuits and consumer protections that are coming. The banksters are 100% parasitical and headed for ruination.
The rules-based liberal order (liberal democracy) is quite real and has replaced any meaningful investments with speculative bubbles and rugpulls, put human life itself up for sale, and waged endless wars, psychological and kinetic. That's the brutal facts rather than beautiful abstractions.
Buddy if you think financial crashes were bad today, you should see what happens when banking is not regulated (great depression). Or, if you think war is bad today, you should see what happens when the world becomes multipolar and countries start carving up the world for territory (WWII).
Like please, read a history book.
I'm sure I agree with you that there are many problems with this system but life without it can get so much worse. The green agenda? 4G? That's the worst thing you can imagine?
Actually, what you're listing above is just another set of beautiful (to you) abstractions. No, "banksters" are not "100% parasitical". The percent is definitely less than 100. But, you know, as they say: the devil is in the details.
This is straight-up Baudrillard simulacra/simulation.
The moment you say "Dao" (or "Agile", or "methodology"), you've already moved from the thing-in-itself to a sign living inside a sign system. That sign can be useful, but it can't be identical to what it points at.
> “The Agile that can be PM’d is not Agile.”
That’s exactly the stages of simulacra in miniature:
- Faithful copy: "Agile" names a set of lived practices that correspond to reality.
- Masks/denatures: cargo-cult rituals distort it (standups-as-status-reporting).
- Masks absence: the org performs Agile theater to hide that genuine agility is gone.
- Pure simulacrum: "Agile" becomes a self-referential brand/signifier (certs, metrics, tooling) that relates primarily to other signs ("Agile maturity model", "story points velocity"), not to any actual working output.
Isn't that also what yields human society cycles ? generations cannot explain their learning well enough, at best the authority lives in inertia for a while and then it evaporates. All new generation misinterpret the past, and the problems reappear.
For a reductionist, it might be better understood as - step outside of your usual mode of thinking. Remember that you don't know everything. Or just - take time to stop and smell the flowers. Try to spend more time noticing and less time analyzing.
There are things that are difficult to communicate directly in the reductionist mode of thought - and are intended to have meaning at multiple levels of abstraction. You have to think a bit more laterally.
Jean Baudrillard is a fraud/charlatan. Semiotics is a fake field. Him and all his friends (i.e. Foucualt, Derrida, DnG, Althussar, etc) are at Chiropractors/ Homeopaths for the mind and at worst actual useful idiots for western intelligence agencies.
They're hair-trigger inactive otherwise. They don't bill CPU unless they're active. The idea is that there isn't really any uncertainty about when it's running; when you stop interacting with it it stops metering.
This is a new shape for a cloud computing thingy and there'll be snags this week with it, but we don't make our money by billing people for stuff they don't want. We've always gone out of our way not to nickel-and-dime casual users and we're trying hard to find new ways to lean into that here.
(Destroying a Sprite you're done with is a perfectly reasonable move; they're disposable.)
My read of his response is that, even though the sprite is in a running state, that doesn’t mean it’s in a billable state given you aren’t connected; that’s not said explicitly, and I’m making an inference, and so it would be helpful if you let us know if you are billed for these hours.
I think the idling feature still needs some work. I created one over the weekend that hasn't idled once, and I've run several tests with sprites that have nothing in them—just `sprite create` and log out, just to see what happens (which unfortunately is nothing, left alone it keeps on running as well.)
I love the idea and most of the execution, I've really enjoyed getting my first sprite configured just the way I want it. It just needs the idling feature to work as advertised before I think I can use it as cost-effectively as it promises.
Get a console in your sprite. Run “screen”. Run a loop in there : while date; do sleep 1; done. Detach screen and exit the session. Wait a few minutes and go back into the sprite. Reattach screen. You’ll see a gap in the timestamps.
They do suspend even when they say they are “running”.
If you're not willing to pay for your own LLM usage to try a free resource offered by the author, that's up to you. But why complain to the author about it? How does your comment enrich the conversation for the rest of us?
Yes, it has actually worked starting with the Pixel 3.
It's called Dual-Band Simultaneous or "STA+AP" (Station + Access Point) concurrency that can bridge an existing wifi connection to an access point to other devices via a hotspot.
And then a few of those users who you treated like adults who don't need surveillance make a private network among themselves and other nodes in Russia and China to exfiltrate the corporation's most sensitive intellectual property, serve as a bridge for state-sponsored bad actors to bypass your firewall, and tunnel command-and-control traffic through your "unrestricted" egress, and now your zero-trust philosophy has created a zero-accountability blind spot that your IR team discovers eighteen months later during a breach investigation.
If your threat is state sponsored bad actors you've already failed. OK, great you blocked VPNs. Now they tunneled their vpn through as HTTPS. You successfully annoyed all your legit users and completely failed to stop the real problem.
Https is also inspected in our place and has been for a decade.
Also there's different classes of state sponsored APT groups. You won't stand a chance against the NSA but there's a lot of state sponsored groups in Russia that are just looking for low hanging fruit to get some foreign money for their regime.
You know, that makes sense for a corporate network. They have an extremely aggressive firewall on the academic campus, which is how it should be.
However, they have failed to provide isolated networks for the research labs which just need it for even downloading LLMs (they have banned huggingface!).
Moreover, a hostel is residential. They should provide either the option of getting an external connection (which I would happily do!) or provide a means of non-stupid internet which they aren't.
Then you've failed in security infrastructure, policy, and enforcement, and you've infantilized your users and wasted a bunch of IT time on checking boxes. The real power move in that case would be ensuring some third party vendor checked the boxes for you, so that your ass gets sufficiently covered and you have a narrative that goes something like "well, we did everything you're supposed to, those pesky superhackers are just soooo devious and skilled that they can get anywhere!"
The actual fix for things like that is to ensure that your sensitive data is properly protected, and things that you don't want exfiltrated aren't put into scenarios where exfiltration is possible. If you need to compromise on security for practicality, then make those exceptions highly monitored with multiple people involved in custody and verification. Zero trust means you don't give any of your users or host devices any trust at all, and modern security software can require multiple party approvals and MFA.
You can use a phone to scan documents as you scroll through them, or mitm hardware devices that appear to be part of a cable, or all sorts of sneaky shenanigans, and it's a never-ending arms race, so you have to decide what level of convenience is worth what level of risk and make policies enforceable and auditable. In some cases that might mean SCIF level security with metal detectors and armed guards, in other cases it might mean ensuring a good password policy for zip files shared via email.
Inconveniencing users by limiting web access and doing the TSA style performative security thing is counterproductive. This doesn't mean you give them install rights, or you don't log web activity, or run endpoint malware scanning, or have advanced unusual activity monitoring on the network and so forth. It just means if Sally from accounting wants to go shopping for ugly christmas sweaters for staff on Etsy, she doesn't have to fill out forms in triplicate and wait 3 months while the IT department gets approvals and management has meetings and the third party security vendor does a policy review and assessment before signing off on it, or telling her no.
The depreciation schedule isn't as big a factor as you'd think.
The marginal cost of an API call is small relative to what users pay, and utilization rates at scale are pretty high. You don't need perfect certainty about GPU lifespan to see that the spread between cost-per-token and revenue-per-token leaves a lot of room.
And datacenter GPUs have been running inference workloads for years now, so companies have a good idea of rates of failure and obsolescence. They're not throwing away two-year-old chips.
> The marginal cost of an API call is small relative to what users pay, and utilization rates at scale are pretty high.
How do you know this?
> You don't need perfect certainty about GPU lifespan to see that the spread between cost-per-token and revenue-per-token leaves a lot of room.
You can't even speculate this spread without knowing even a rough idea of cost-per-token. Currently, it's total paper math on what the cost-per-token is.
> And datacenter GPUs have been running inference workloads for years now,
And inference resource intensity is a moving target. If a new model comes out that requires 2x the amount of resources now.
> They're not throwing away two-year-old chips.
Maybe, but they'll be replaced by either (a) a higher performance GPU that can deliver the same results with less energy, less physical density, and less cooling or (b) the extended support costs becomes financially untenable.
A world order based on rules makes it possible to live at a much higher level of abstraction.
Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly just figments of collective belief. But these wispy and unreal ideas that everyone believes in make it possible for most people to live longer, healthier and less difficult lives.
The "rules-based order" was always partly mythical, but as long as everyone kept pretending, it mostly continued to function.
But when we devolve from the rules-based order to the old order of pure power and might-makes-right, kings and dictators, when there's no more collective belief that the rules apply to the rich and powerful, then the tower of abstractions collapses, and we're back to the cold, hard, brutal and difficult real world.
People will find out that life in the real world is a lot poorer and more miserable than life at the top of the tower of abstractions, even if your brokerage account appears to double.
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