Yeah the author is hedging a lot here and seems like they admit that it's not really resource imperialism at the end of the article.

I think the word you are looking for is "academic"

... god forbid Tooze criticize the admin that got us into this mess, tho?

Tooze's point on China is a bit tangential but imo also correct - that the Biden admin took a confrontational approach that was a continuity of Trump's policy, not a break with it, and that it's ultimately doomed to failure while increasing the likelihood of conflict

I think no one in the Biden admin saw that as their mission early on, but there were plenty of people on the left who saw prosecuting Trump as a necessary step that wasn't pursued with any real energy. This is the biggest contributor toward their failure

Is this some sort of vendetta against him for being pro-Palestine? Otherwise I don't really get being this willfully obtuse

Who's to say, really? Pic unrelated

bad

They just can't make any money off this with oil prices as low as they are. Venezuelan oil is low quality, their infrastructure would need a lot of investment to bring up to modern standards, and the last thing the oil market needs is a huge glut of supply. It's a lose-lose for the US oil companies

That battle is over. It ended... probably around a year ago, though I could see arguments for earlier too. Almost every software engineer is using LLMs for something - including the ones working on the OS of your device and the apps and websites you use. Targeting FOSS devs is silly

it just gets very tiring explaining the same handful of facts over and over again to people who are not particularly interested in listening to you

Every single company in the world that writes software is using genAI and the only reason this hasn't come up much in the discourse is most of the people who are mad only care about art and not how the coding sausage gets made

Yeah. Baseline hostility of AI discourse on here is causing many people (not just the op) to interpret things maximally uncharitably

Truman: well, i wouldn't call them "profits"

Yeah exactly, for cutting edge stuff they're not going to be that useful but >95% of work is not cutting edge for most people

This is just very strange coming from a tech policy guy - even more conservative software engineers are finding productive uses for LLMs. There are still regular debates on how best to use them and how to verify their output, but the question of whether they are useful is settled.

At a certain level of capability, we're just playing semantic games - if LLMs lack these things but are nonetheless very useful, perhaps these things are less important than you think

This is a funny one because modern linguists are basically in complete agreement that the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong

everyone wants to do woke kiwifarms. i don't think we should do woke kiwifarms