Many people do not hear as they read. In fact the skill of speed-reading depends on turning the auditory experience off:

There are three types of reading:

• Subvocalization: sounding out each word internally, as reading to oneself. This is the slowest form of reading.
• Auditory reading: hearing out the read words. This is a faster process.
• Visual reading: understanding the meaning of the word, rather than sounding or hearing. This is the fastest process.

Subvocalization readers (Mental readers) generally read at approximately 250 words per minute, auditory readers at approximately 450 words per minute and visual readers at approximately 700 words per minute. Proficient readers are able to read 280–350 wpm without compromising comprehension.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

Islam, just like Christianity, has many different groups that believe the same basic doctrine but disagree on many points. The main splits in Islam (that echo some aspects of the Catholic vs. Protestant split) as Sunni and Shia. Each divides and divides again into small communities centred on one mosque (just as, eg, Protestantism divides and divides down to individual congregations).

The big question is: how do groups of people decide which parts of the religious documents, history and practice are more relevant or even correct?

Some groups are quite ‘secular’ (like the Church of England) while others are quite ‘fundamental’, meaning that they much more strictly follow whatever the group decides are the foundation of the religion.

Is it possible to be able so say which of these groups is right? It seems to me that we have been fighting over this since before records began, so we most definitely do not have a way to do this that any majority agrees with. I don’t think anyone can say:

Islamist groups purposely … twist actual Islamic ideology while the Christian Right just doesn’t understand the religious text they claim to follow.

Danny Boyd wrote an excellent video essay on A Knight’s Tale. I too always wonder why there’s always someone cutting onions when I choose to watch.

And the fun thing of ‘fired at will’ is that it is enshrined in so-called ‘Right to Work’ laws. The evil would be hilarious is it wasn’t so horrible.

I’m guessing that exactly the same LLM model is used (somehow) on both sides - using different models or different weights would not work at all.

An LLM is (at core) an algorithm that takes a bunch of text as input and produces an output of a list of word/probabilities such that the sum of all probabilities adds to 1.0. You could place a wrapper on this that creates a list of words by probability. A specific word can be identified by the index in the list, i.e. first word, tenth word etc.

(Technically the system uses ‘tokens’ which represent either whole words or parts of words, but that’s not important here).

A document can be compressed by feeding in each word in turn, creating the list in the LLM, and searching for the new word in the list. If the LLM is good, the output will be a stream of small integers. If the LLM is a perfect predictor, the next word will always be the top of the list, i.e. a 1. A bad prediction will be a relatively large number in the thousands or millions.

Streams of small numbers are very well (even optimally) compressed using extant technology.

Completely agree.

People are tribal - they tend to conform to what the group thinks and does. We’re also primed with strong us vs. them tendencies, that is you want your team to win whatever happens.

As you say, if you believe that (for example) your friends and neighbours think democrats are radical socialists out to destroy American life, it would be highly dangerous to vote democrat let alone be on team democrat.

Ah yes, but you forgot when, during the campaign, Trump said “Fake news! I don’t know anything about Project 2025” which then allowed all the press to ignore it.

This changes everything life hack: Whenever you’re caught in a lie, just say “fake news” and go on as if nothing has happened. Works for rape, bribery, theft, corruption and some say even murder.

I’m hoping for a draw. After 12 brutal rounds.

Well, he had met King Charles and Camilla earlier that week, so he is giving audiences - at least to people he respects.

It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.

This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.

What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?

What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.

And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.

I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.

They STILL need to put in money to create their own product.

Sure, but the cost to duplicate the product is tiny compared to researching, developing then creating a production run for it. And this fake normally severely impacts the profits for the inventor.

But now we’re just repeating the same arguments.

You appear to want to completely burn down a system you don’t understand because of some examples of misuse. For example, as there are slumlords, should we make all property free? Or should we solve the underlying problem (of massive capital flows to the rich?)

You also have no idea how to read and understand a patent. The way they are written is horrendously verbose and highly confusing, but so are medical research papers or legal case summaries, and for the similar reasons: these are highly technical documents that have to follow common law (i.e. a long history of legal decisions taken in IP disputes).

The real problem in the US IMHO has been the constant defunding of the patent office that has allowed a large number of very poor patents to be filed. The problems you are screaming about largely go to that root cause.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you have no idea how bad that would be for everybody but the mega corporations.

Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,

And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents

plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,

Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company

even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,

That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone

They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…

The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).

If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.

I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.

As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years

All evidence points to the opposite of your conclusion.

In places where IP laws are weak or non-existent, very little fundamental or expensive research is done by companies - because the result is immediately cloned by 100 competitors. In medicine, companies will not research and develop new drugs to market unless they can get a return on the investment. Even in places with strong IP laws, development of drugs that can’t produce a return in the limited monopoly window is simply not done (eg with a small number of patients or when 1 course of a drug will permanently cure the patient), so many diseases do not have treatments.

In countries where there is strong IP laws, innovation jumps because innovating creates new things that people/companies can sell for profit. A personal area of interest is development of small-arms - every single advance from muskets to modern weapons is documented in patents in the US and Europe; the rate of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries was incredible - and that is via patents and profit in the free market.

Now, we can have a productive argument about state sponsored research - but unless the state undertakes all research in an economy (which would be staggering overreach), we need IP laws.

We can also discuss patents on software (which IMHO are not needed because companies do fundamental research without patent laws like in the UK).

We can also discuss what is the appropriate time that copyright should remain - the Disney law in the US is a ridiculous overreach. It was 25 years or until the death of the author/artist - that worked very well for centuries.

You don’t need government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation.

Here’s one that I enjoyed and covers a critical period of modern East Asian history: “The Gate” by François Bizot.

It’s him recounting how he travelled to Cambodia and was captured by the Khmer Rouge. He survived … just … By forming a relationship with Comrade Duch who

as the Chairman of Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp, and head of the Santebal, Kang Kek Iew was responsible for the interrogation and torture of thousands of individuals, and was convicted for the execution of at least 12,272 individuals, including women and children [Wikipedia]

While he covers the history of the Khmer Rouge period, his writing is highly empathic and discusses the suffering of himself and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens at the hands of other ordinary citizens and how could this possibly happen. It’s a highly emotional book.

Best of luck with your reading!

Yes!

But the covid situation is way worse than you think. The government stimulus was really helpful to the poor and middle class, but they spent all that money.

And who profited from that? The asset owners. Covid stimulus essentially was a direct transfer from the government to company owners and house rentals. These rich guys then used it to buy other assets such as more houses, equities and businesses. That’s why the stock market went up - your money went straight into it.

Yeah, but let’s consider what happens:

• Tariff applied
• Prices go up
• Supermarket trolleyfull becomes more expensive
• People have less money to buy other things
• Companies sell less
• Company profits fall
• Stock valuation drops
• GDP falls

That’s why the Dow Jones and S&P are lower - this shrinks company profits and US GDP.

Their pride.

That was fantastic and a must-view for this topic.

And don’t forget the napple!

I think this is the primary reason, but I’ll add a couple of thoughts.

1. His people. The core of his actions right now is ‘project 2025’ which was written by an extreme right wing think tank in Washington called ‘The Heritage Foundation’. They’ve been around since Reagan and have been thought leaders in the GOP all this time. In other words, they know the system extremely well and they are well organised.

2. His supporters. A large number of his supporters are poor, Christian folk, often from red states. They are poor because the structure of the American economy has been designed to extract money from the non-rich and channel it to big business and rich individuals. Think Walmart and Musk. For 40 years GOP have been telling the lie that billionaires as job creators, that taxes, regulations and unions are bad, that trickle-down economics works. This has led to staggering amounts of money taken from the middle and working classes and piled into bank accounts of the real elites (here meaning billionaires and biggest companies). Trump’s supporters know the economy is rigged and they want to change it. Unfortunately they believe their church leaders (who have unabashedly instructed their flocks on politics and single issues like abortion) and the mainstream media (meaning Fox) who push these lies incessantly. The Democrats have not attacked (let alone resolved) these issues under Obama and Biden. But Trump claims he’ll shake up Washington as an outsider and tackle these issues. His supporters somehow do not equate a nepo baby, ivy-league educated billionaire ex-president as one of the elite. They think of him as ‘their man’.

In short, the propaganda from Fox, the Internet, their churches and their neighbours has persuaded them to vote against their interests and elect a group of elite political insiders and businessmen who have taken 4 years to plan the hostile takeover of the government in order to channel even more money to themselves.