loathsome dongeater

he/him

a cool (brr) dude

  • 281 Posts
  • 3.15K Comments
Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: May 14th, 2020

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  • I personally think having a common national language is crucial provided it comes from the right place. That is, not as a tool for the erasure of non-dominant cultural identities. Regardless of how it is being done I am certain the crackerverse will see it as such anyway.

    India has a real problem in this regard. The national language is supposed to be Hindi. But non-Hindi states oppose the adoption of Hindi because historically it was viewed as an imposition by the Congress government which was dominated by high-caste Hindus from the north. Then English is a language of great import because it is economically significant. So in non-Hindi states, the way things are, kids will need to learn three languages (regional, Hindi and English). The current education policy states (from wikipedia):

    The Policy recommends a ‘three-language formula’, including at least two native Indian languages. It also states that no language will be imposed on the students.

    This is only a guideline because it is not being inplemented anywhere since teaching kids three languages is straight up unfeasible.

    So if China could make Mandarin plus regional the curriculum, it would be easier to implement and it would give regional languages a lot more breathing room.















  • India is subservient to the USA. It’s because we have the largest trade surplus against them by a huge margin ($45 billion, the next largest is $17 billion) so the economy is reliant on the USA buying our low value added goods and cheap services. There is no scope or plan to catch up in technological capabilities so the only option is to bootlick.

    Hindutva fascists have also been sympathetic to israel since the beginning. This was in contrast to the Indian National Congress who at least nominally supported Palestine. I don’t know why this is (apart from the rabid Islamophobia). As a result of this the BJP government of today has warm relations with israel.



  • Yeah there are strange takes on both sides. Doctorow for example talks about liberating LLMs and his act of liberation is just… using a local model. Normal people cannot liberate LLMs because asidr from the extremely high level of expertise, it requires a bonkers amount of resources. As such the only thing adjacent to liberation that is happening right now is the release of Chinese open source models. No one gives a fuck about Mistral, Trinity or Llama. But Doctorow does not get into the details of this liberation.

    Tante’s post on the other hand also has soms good bits. Purity testing is an idealistic distraction but purity testing is often used as a strawman to distract from what he called negative externalities. But the part about Omelas is just crazy. Who reads that story and concludes that the correct choice to walk away?