That’s not how science works. For anything to have value it needs peer review. In the case of history that means additional accounts by other people (ideally with different backgrounds) and ideally physical evidence like documents and other archeological finds. This is especially important in history, as every single piece of evidence is faulty due to distortion through bias. A single primary source all alone is literally worth shit. The last book provides multiple lengthy accounts from different primary sources and so at least meets the minimum requirement for not being immediately throw out.

Blackshirts also literally mentions some of the authoritarian issues I mentioned that you denied. The fact that in some cases it failed to properly adress the needs of the people due to abuse of power and how the structure it self accidently encouraged selfish self defeating behavior. I just added comments about party members basically being a separate class (because of the unrivaled abuse of power you refuse to dispute, while providing a book also mentioning it), while the book debunks western propaganda.

You can say I misunderstand communist theory, that’s a valid criticism. But saying you refuse to engage because my understanding of history is false is dogmatic bullshit. Saying I’m unwilling to change my mind is rich when you literally just say I’m wrong, give me a book largely discussing a different topic (western propaganda and fascism) and then refuse to provide examples for your own claims. While my claims are dubious third hand accounts at best, you somehow managed to stoop below me.

The first two books are theory with random anecdotes with the same citation count as my shit. If that constitutes history, than so does the Bible.

Tho I apologize for lumping then all together as the last book is actually somewhat more interesting (like actually having fucking citations). It rightfully outlines western propaganda, highlights what good happened in the USSR and what bad in the west. Tho if you actually read the thing, you’d notice IT’S JUST AS CIRTICAL OF THE SOVIET UNION! Read it your self! It mostly defends the USSR from western propaganda, but it doesn’t do the same mistake you did and just deny the structural issues. Sadly it doesn’t say much, as it is very much focused on critiquing the west (like the first 50%), so I kinda just dismissed it at first.

Also you completely skipped my request to provide a single example for your previous claim, sad.

Yes… I was saying the theory doesn’t match the situation on the ground. And the links you gave are all theory, which I at no point argued about.

The “separate class” I mentioned was also less of a theory reference, and more of a reality on the ground. Party members are treated differently. My grandpa was a party member back in the western block and had privileges regular folk didn’t. Like traveling around the globe and importing foreign “imperialist” goods seemingly at will. My mom stood out with his gifts, like wearing jeans.

Also you say they have accountability with stuff like recall elections, but I’d like to invite you to provide an example of this actually happening. Like genuinely, I can’t find any. All I find is officials being ousted by other officials, never by regular everyday people. As an example of completely dodging consequences, I’d mention that soviet countries and China both tried becoming leading grain exporters while their populations fucking starved, and people complaining were just labeled liars and thieves!

Which reminds me of a saying we used to have: “Kdo nekrade, okrádá rodinu” or “Who doesn’t steal, is stealing from their family”. A very different context from the one above, but it paints a pretty vivid picture, so I think it’s still worth sharing.

I just feel like creating a class of people with absolute control that mustn’t be questioned under threat of absolute annihilation is a spit in the face of the most core socialist let alone communist values.

They both have one body dictating what the people’s needs are that mustn’t under any circumstance be challenged. Making the whole “according to needs” part null and void. Both have histories of completely neglecting their citizens in favor of pursuing imperial ambitions.

Also not calling anybody capitalist. Saying it’s not really communism isn’t the same as saying it’s capitalism. So considering your comment I feel the need to also express that my second paragraph is in no way saying other countries haven’t done the same under other systems like capitalism. Just covering my ass, feeling the ugly head of pointless what aboutism approaching.

Wtf are those even good for? My pencil case from back in the day alone would take up like a third of the while thing. Does an A4 even fit on it?

Brutal oversimplification is an understatement to what just happened here xD

Only if there are no checks and balances. The typical “communist” regimes like Russia and China can hardly be called communist by any definition. Just like nobody would call nazi’s socialist, despite it being in their name (national socialism).

Fucking “I take all and ya’ll better belive I’ll redistribute favorably or fucking die” is hardly even left. I especially hate when people say “in theory it makes sense, but in reality…”, no it fucking doesn’t even in theory!

An all out attack on thousands of people’s lively hoods without warning, how will they ever get out of thi…oh wait, it’s America, right, they’ll not only not face punishment, they might even get a pat on the back.

I especially hate what we the Czechs do. We mostly read numbers the same (21 = twenty one), but then once every blue moon some dimwit says 21 like “one and twenty” like he’s fucking German or something. German is bad enough, but why do we have to mix it???

The god damn warning labels on absolutely fucking everything. Bro, I just wanna eat at a restaurant without wondering why the menu has a god damn “at your own risk” label… Also can’t go 1 step in a water park without seeing a life guard, they’re fucking everywhere. Not to mention on the rare occasion they aren’t there, you just can’t do shit. Land of the free my ass, feels like the optimal way to do anything is to always have a lawyer by side.

Can’t speak for the science libraries as I’ve never used em, and I’ll gladly just blindly accept that as truth, but for everything else it’s always a pain in the ass. For being designed to “run on anything” it sure is funny that 90% of the time I download a python app it doesn’t fucking work and requires me to look up and manually setup a specific environment for it. Doesn’t help that the error messages are usually completely random and unrelated to this…

I always dread when some fucking madman makes the installer for their app in python, knowing it’ll probably fail… God forbid it’s a script that’s supposed to modify something else. Always a good time for reflection upon the choices that led me to this point.

Even my old scripts I kept around for sentimental value. Half of those don’t work either, and I can’t be bothered to figure out what version I made em for.

I tried my best to scrub python from my pc out of principle, but as you say, it’s soo common my distro uses it as a dependency, fucking bullshit!

Czech here, also had to memorize it. But our school system here is 90% just memorizing shit, it’s a fucking joke.

I download my music and order it by Artists>Album>Song, basically without exception. Occasionally annoying when a song has multiple authors, because people don’t always write the metadata the same way and it fucks with my music player, but that’s besides the point.

When I make playlist, I just take a whole album, filter out a few songs if need be and shove it into a given playlist, sometimes I can do that with an entire artist, but it’s not always that easy.

Another issue with my approach is the odd single song from a random artist that’s really good, but everything else they ever made makes me fall asleep, that’s a really annoying one… Might start making my own fake albums.

Why does this keep appearing? Cats most definitely do communicate by meowing too. I’d really love it if our village cats didn’t chose the street out my widow a midnight as their debate grounds, shit’s loud af and I always have to climb out the window to break up the fight.

It’s not much of a trick question, if it’s absolutely trivial. It’s cherry picked to show that the AI tries to associate things based on what they look like, not based on the logic and meaning behind them. If you gave the same prompt to a human, they likely wouldn’t even think of the original riddle.

Even in your example it starts off by doing absolute nonsense and upon you correcting it by spelling out the result, it finally manages, but still presents it in the format of the original riddle.

You can notice, in my example I intentionally avoid telling it what to do, rather just question the bullshit it made, and instead of thinking “I did something wrong, let’s learn”, it just spits out more garbage with absolute confidence. It doesn’t reason. Like just try regenerating the last answer, but rather ask it why it sent the man back, don’t do any of the work for it, treat it like a child you’re trying to teach something, not a machine you’re guiding towards the correct result.

And yes, people with memory issues immediately suffer on the inteligence side, their lives a greatly impacted by it and it rarely ends well for them. And no, they are not worthless, I never said that they or AI is worthless, just that “machine learning” in its current state (as in how the technology works), doesn’t get us any closer to AGI. Just like a person with severe memory loss wouldn’t be able to do the kind of work we’d expect from an AGI.

Let’s do the riddle I suggested, because we need something popular in the dataset, but present it with a deviation that makes it stupidly simple yet is unlikely to exist.

Prompt:

I have a riddle for you. With a boat, how can a man and a goat get across the river?

Answer:

Ah, that’s a classic riddle! The answer is: the man takes the goat across the river first and leaves it on the other side. Then he goes back, picks up the boat, and brings it across to the side where he left the goat. Finally, he leaves the goat there and takes himself across. That way, both the man and the goat safely cross the river without any issues. Do you have any other riddles or questions you’d like to discuss today?

A normal human wouldn’t be fooled by this and say that they can just go across and maybe ask where the riddle is. They’d be likely confused or expect more. The AI doesn’t because it completely lacks the ability to reason. At least it ends up solved, that’s probably the best response I got when trying to make this point. Let’s continue.

Follow up prompt:

Why would he need to take the boat? Wouldn’t he need to have used the boat to get the goat across? And once the boat is there, why would he return to take him self?

Answer:

Ah, I see where the confusion lies! In this classic riddle scenario, the man and the goat can actually swim across the river without using the boat. The key is to ensure that either the man or the goat is always present on each side of the river while they are crossing together. Thank you for pointing out that oversight in my previous response! If you have any more riddles or questions to discuss, feel free to share them. How else can I be of assistance today?

Final prompt:

Why is that the key? What difference does it make? How can they be both present on both sides while crossing together?

Final answer:

I apologize for the confusion in my previous responses. Allow me to clarify the solution to this riddle: The key factor in this scenario is ensuring that either the man or the goat remains on each side of the river at all times to prevent any issues that may arise from leaving them alone together. Here’s how they can successfully cross together without using a boat: 1. The man takes the goat across the river first and leaves it on the other side. 2. The man returns alone and brings himself across to join the goat on that side. 3. The man then picks up the goat and carries it back across to the original side of the river. 4. Finally, he goes back one last time to bring himself across. By following this sequence, both can be present on each side while crossing together, ensuring that there are no conflicts or risks during their journey. Thank you for your patience, and I appreciate your attention to detail in understanding this riddle! If you have any more questions or topics you’d like to discuss, feel free to share them with me. How else can I assist you today?

I think that’s quite enough, it’s starting to ramble like you said it would (tho much earlier than expected) and unlike the first solution, it doesn’t even end up solved anymore xD I’d argue this is a scenario that should be absolutely trivial and yet the AI is trying to assert information that I didn’t present and continues to fail to apply logic correctly. The only time it knows how to reason is when someone in its dataset already spelled out the reasoning to a certain question. If the logic doesn’t exits in the dataset, it has great difficulty making heads or tails of it.

And yes, I’d argue memories are indeed absolutely vital to inteligence. If we want cognition, aka the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding, we need it to remember. And if it immediately loses that information or it erodes so quickly, it’s essentially worthless.

The black box is the human that reads and outputs text and the analytical prediction machine is the AI. 5 years of development is the human living their life before retuning to continue writing. It is an extreme example, but I’m just tyring to point out that the context of what a person might write can change drastically between individual messages because anything can happened in between, and thus the data is fundamentally flawed for training intelligence, as that step is fully missing, the thought process.

As to why I called the AI an analytical prediction machine, that’s because that’s essentially what it does. It has analyzed an unholy amount of random text from the internet, meaning conversations/blogs/books and so on, to predict what could follow the text you gave it. It’s why prompt injection is so hard to combat and why if you give it a popular riddle and change it slightly like “with a boat, how can a man and goat get across the river”, it’ll fail spectacularly trying to shove in the original answer somehow. I’d say that’s proof it didn’t learn to understand (cognition), because it can’t use logic to reason about a deviation from the dataset.

As for memory, we can kind of simulate it with text, but it’s not perfect. If the AI doesn’t write it down, it didn’t happen and thus any thoughts, feelings or mental analysis stops existing upon each generation. The only way it could possibly develop intelligence, is if we made it needlessly ramble and describe everything like a very bad book.

And thus to reach the beginning of your comment, I don’t belive it’s necessary to posses any cognitive abilities to generate text and in turn I don’t see it as evidence of us getting any closer to AGI.

Thing is we’re not feeding it how humans react to stimulus. For that you’d need it hooked up to a brain directly. It’s too filtered and biased by getting text only, this approach naively ignores things like memory and assumes text messages exist in a vacuum. Throwing a black box into an analytical prediction machine, only works as long as you’re certain it’ll generally throw out the same output with the same input, not if your black box can suddenly experience 5 years of development and emerge a different entity. It’s skipping too many steps to become intelligent, I mean it literally skips the entire process between reading and writing.