Your comment tastes a lot like American right-wing billionaire word salad. The only thing missing is some reference to Soros.
Orban is supported directly by Trump, Thiel, and company. These are literally the most elite rich folks on the globe. They are all against democracy and are pro-authoritarian. As TFA points out, the experiment has been run, and it leads to ruin. That's just facts.
Indeed the linked article is its own jumble of leftist billionaire word-salad. Classic stuff like “defending democracy” while simultaneously overturning elections (see Romania) that they don’t like and subverting the will of the electorate by flooding the country with refugees (see EU penalties).
And what exactly is wrong with classic modern Democracy/Social Democracy, if the alternative is authoritarianism?
Even neolibs are better than authoritarians. The Overton Window has moved so far to the right, that self described nazis are invited to the White House, and this is an actual conversation that we are having.
>And what exactly is wrong with classic modern Democracy/Social Democracy, if the alternative is authoritarianism?
That is has become a uniparty, undemocratic authoritarianism itself, and when applied as foreign influence, it's just another mask of global neoliberalism and client state relations.
I don't think the poster was saying that Orban wasn't bad, just that Cato saying something about it isn't particularly signifying.
Also... neoliberalism is basically what you think of when you think "right-wing billionaire word salad" from like 6 years ago. Neoliberalism is the the idea of elevating "the market" to the absolute primacy of... everything. Neoliberalism is coined relative to the traditional "liberalism", specifically the part of traditional liberalism that supported free trade and marketization.
The Cato Institute was literally founded by one of the Koch brothers, and has been staunchly neoliberal/libertarian. It stands in opposition to many of the policies of the current far-right/ex-right movement, because those policies call for a fusion of market and government that actually is fundamentally incompatible with neoliberalism. Furthermore, we should be aware that the populist surge that is at least partly powering this surge is itself a reaction to the conditions that neoliberalism (and institutional capture) has created.
Yes, and the Overton Window has moved so far to the far-right, that my largely progressive ass is agreeing with Cato in this case. Yet, here we are, due to the content of TFA being based on fact.
Were you surprised to learn that Cato are neoliberal shills? Water is wet too.
As for Soros, you mean the finacial speculator and policy influence middleman? Yeah, such a paragon for democracy and openess.
Yes, Orban is supported directly by Trump, Thiel, and company. The elites at large however, before, during, and after Trump do not support him that much. As for Thiel, I'm not sure whether he likes or dislikes Orban, but that's irrelevant, as he has his grabby hands in Europe already anyway.
Orban might be a bs populist, but the basic idea, of putting national sovereignity first, and dismantling all the crap influence of the neoliberal AND liberal global establishment is solid. Trump got elected for something like that, before pissing all over it with his neocon/neoliberal hawk friends. Even Bernie got high on a similar ticket, before the Dems gutted him and he put his tail between his legs.
>As TFA points out, the experiment has been run, and it leads to ruin. That's just facts.
Well, if an article says it, I guess there's no denying it. Articles, after all, are facts, and can't have their own agendas. Especially from a think tank as neutral and with such a great track record as Cato.
Orban is bad (for all the wrong reasons), but you know who Cato loves (for all the wrong reasons again)? Neoliberal useful idiot Millei:
Why is your argument so 100% this side, or 100% that side? It's giving major "Genocide Joe" -> Trump victory energy.
Cato used to be the something like the ultimate devil in my mind, they still are to some extent based on their origins, but things have gotten so much worse that they actually posted a rational argument.
Do their origins mean that I have to be so tribalist that I cannot agree with one of their posts? I live near Hungary, and see the effects of Orbanists daily.
Did you actually read TFA? It's a downright flogging of the ideas behind Project 2025/Heritage Foundation/MAGA philosophy.
lol you joking? point to a single piece of software on your computer that is maintained by academics/researchers ("came from" means absolutely nothing - this isn't a discussion about royalties or credit).
Weasely moving the goalposts. If we were stuck with mere "maintaining", you'd still be using the most primitive CPU and OS. Besides, once something is invented and shaped and studied, even a monkey can maintain it.
The point is the things that you get to use, and tech industry gets to maintain, come from research in the academic fields, in corporate R&D research labs from people with PhDs and everything (from Xerox's to Googles and Anthropics), and of course from direct parterships with universities as well.
Not as in "they created that in 1976", as in: the past, the current, and the next things you'll use, will come from that too. This includes anything from Algol, Lisp and OO and TeX to Monads, and Futures, and Prototype inheritance, and NNs and LLMs.
my guy this is the most bog standard defense of academia that exists - that they are the original progenitors of everything. it's not even true (industry pioneers plenty of things, especially in tech/swe) but even if it were, it would still be banal because by the same logic i might as well be worshipping prokaryotes instead of academics.
> in corporate R&D research labs from people with PhDs
lol tell me you've never been in a research group without telling me. hate to break it to you, as someone with a PhD and as someone who spent some time in an industry research group at the beginning of their career, almost nothing comes out of these groups in tech (the stuff that does see the light of day is the exception that proves the rule).
"Our product can destroy humanity, and it's not some crank telling you this, it's the company and CEO making it themselves, but we'll continue to make it anyway, so suck it up" but also "I'm just a humble guy, why can't we all live in peace?"
Everything about Altman makes me think "scammer". If he has one super-power, it is to convince people of his own importance.
OpenAi doesn't have much time left before they are shuffled off into bankruptcy, and they certainly aren't ruling the fate of man or anything like that. It's like the CEO of Enron claiming to hold the key to the future of mankind's energy resources, and people writing ponderous articles about it and debating whether Ken Lay will be a benevolent dictator or not.
Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
Iran itself in its current form is a continuous line of failures of CIA and MI6 that led to their revolution against highly unpopular shah that was undemocratically installed only by those powers.
Why do you think back then the us embassy situation evolved as it did. 'Embassy' my ass, full of cia folks regardless what shallow hollywood flicks try to propagate, meddling with internal affairs for profit and power of british and americans, while impoverished common locals suffered greatly.
As usual with cia it backfired tremendously, made huge mess for decades in entire region, killed gazillion of innocents but since there aint no us citizens its just some annoying background noise of some brown 'people', right.
Anybody with above-maga intelligence can piece together those few wikipedia articles, but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans. If at least you guys learned from your collosal mistakes...
> but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans.
We've simply had decades of propaganda teaching us that the US is the most moral nation that has only fought moral wars for moral reasons.
A lot of the history books are about American exceptionalism and triumph. Even when they cover topics like slavery and civil rights, they paint it as being temporary embarrassments that we got over and now everything is OK.
MAGA is just a bunch of people who swallowed that propaganda whole and never questioned it in the slightest. We can see that in the fact that they get really upset about history lessons that are even slightly critical or analytical of America's past.
I keep seeing comments that refer to Iranians as "brown people" - usually to emphasize their perceived "otherness" by the ignorant, as in this case. But Iranians aren't brown, or Arab apart from a small minority, and relatively speaking their culture isn't even that "other" - it would probably feel more familiar to the average American than some European countries even.
Do Americans really hear "Iran" and think of durka-durka from Team America?
Iranians tend to have a little more pigment in their skin and it's not a minority.
I get why you'd say this, Iranians don't have particularly dark skin and some are as white as my English/swedish ancestors.
> Do Americans really hear "Iran" and think of durka-durka from Team America?
Some do. But usually the "killing brown people" is a shorthand for the fact that US policy has mostly focused on immiserating non-western-European nations for the benefit of of the US.
It implies racism at the core of US policy because only Western European nations are considered civilized and deserving of fair international treatment.
Billions all over the world managed to acquire it just fine.
If that's an acquired taste, I doubt 99% of drinks that aren't an acquired taste would do much better, assuming there's anything doing better than coffee to begin with.
>"MCP is less discoverable than a CLI" - that doesn't make any sense in terms of agent context. Once an MCP is connected the agent should have full understanding of the tools and their use, before even attempting to use them. In order for the agent to even know about a CLI you need to guide the agent towards it - manually, every single session, or through a "skill" injection - and it needs to run the CLI commands to check them.
Knowledge about any MCP is not something special inherent in the LLM, it's just an agent side thing. When it comes to the LLM, it's just some text injected to its prompting, just like a CLI would be.
reply