very illustrative of how important (and beneficial) machiavelli can be for the development of a tolerable liberalism

i can see an argument along the lines of: “it’d be good but we should be cautious about blowback” voted becoming firm “should” voters when the revealed blowback was pretty minimal. was that what you had in mind?

**’surprisingly’ in the sense of: ‘i would have expected a different approach to have worked better.’ still surprising to me that the best translation software has basically no inbuilt sense of semantics or syntax.

*exact origins are hard to pin down and ‘originally’ is probably too strong. but the current wave of transformer-only machine learning algorithms was kicked off by the landmark paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which looked at translation software en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenti...

LLM’s were originally* developed for translation and that is actually something they do extremely (and surprisingly**) well. one of the use cases for which they should exist.

more of a fan of ‘yelling at the left,’ i suppose ;)

on the other hand, at least at the level of emotional narratives, don’t you think Mamdani’s victory lends some credibility to the feeling that ‘Bernie would have won’? rather than putting it to bed

you mentioned “seeing liberals actively work with them” but that sounds like you’re living in a world where he got the NYT endorsement!! i got a very different picture of the campaign, and one which does much more to feed than to challenge my emotional gut aversion to liberals

having a hard time buying claims that the Zohran race (a) didn’t lean on criticism of big money in politics and (b) didn’t support the left’s narrative that democratic insiders will try to keep them out at any cost (including backing terrible candidates)

👍

i don’t really get the analogy there

mods. punch down on that guy

principles without tactics have led the social democratic left to some quite silly places in recent years, but tactics without principles seems to be leading the labour party down a very dark road