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Cake day: March 5th, 2024

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  • Uh, no, not really, I don’t think the reserve currency makes China subservient to us in any way, shape or form. It’s not like the US can somehow remote control the dollars in distribution out in the world, or somehow control who gets them and who doesn’t. Under our capitalist system, anyone can get their hands on some if they really want. There’s also nothing really stopping them from buying a bunch of Euros too, and honestly, they probably have a bunch of those in savings as well. And some Japanese yen, Korean won, etc etc etc, alongside gold and everything else under the sun. That’s just smart diversification of assets.

    Being the global reserve of preference for everybody does confer a certain advantage in ease of trade, but it’s really overblown. It’s not like the Euro or Yuan is some worthless scrap of paper nobody wants. It definitely doesn’t confer any sort of control.

    Any other thoughts?



  • The inevitable end result will be subservience to China.

    citation needed

    These folks like to throw around words like subservience, but I’m not sure how you get that without conquering someone militarily. People like to talk about NATO subservience to the US, for instance, but Trump doesn’t seem to be waltzing into Greenland any time soon. Pretty weak subservience if you ask me, given how much smaller Denmark is than the US.



  • Yeah I caught that too, I’d be curious to know more about what specifically they meant by that.

    Being able to link all of the words that have a similar meaning, say, nearby, close, adjacent, proximal, side-by-side, etc and realize they all share something in common could be done in many ways. Some would require an abstract understanding of what spatial distance actually is, an understanding of physical reality. Others would not, one could simply make use of word adjacency, noticing that all of these words are frequently used alongside certain other words. This would not be abstract, it’d be more of a simple sum of clear correlations. You could call this mathematical framework a universal language if you wanted.

    Ultimately, a person learns meaning and then applies language to it. When I’m a baby I see my mother, and know my mother is something that exists. Then I learn the word “mother” and apply it to her. The abstract comes first. Can an LLM do something similar despite having never seen anything that isn’t a word or number?









  • I don’t know where you get your info, but China and Russia have a frenemy relationship, a friendly rivalry, basically. This goes back to Stalin’s limited support for the CCP in their early days, or even before when the Russian Tsar conquered huge swaths of land from the Qing Dynasty during their Century of Humiliation, about the time when we Americans were busy having our Civil War. We see it to this day, where China could have a huge and decisive effect on the Russo-Ukrainian War if they wished and fully threw in with Russia, but instead are happy to sit back and war profiteer while Russia takes heavy loses and the West spends money instead of making it.

    Then Iran and Saudi Arabia are archenemies. Iran is a Shia-majority theocracy, SA is a Sunni-majority secular monarchy with a history of persecuting Shias, and even warming up to Israel before Oct 7th. They have a long history of conflict.

    Not sure how Turkey gets on the list either, Turkey has consistently played both sides, always being in it for Turkey. I don’t see the benefit for them to actually pick a side, thus losing their benefits from the other. We see this clearly, again, in how they’ve approached the Russo-Ukrainian War. Like cozying up to Putin, but hey, have some free Bayraktars, Ukraine!

    I know a lot of people put a lot of effort into trying to make it seem like a real WW3 with fairly even sides is plausible in the near future, but it always requires a lot of cherry picking and ignoring realities for them to spin their stories together.