What happens if the Venezuelan people decide they want their oil profits to stay in Venezuela rather than flowing into oil company coffers? Will they have the "freedom" to choose that?
Don't get me wrong, Maduro being toppled is a positive in isolation, but it's still wait-and-see regarding what he gets replaced with.
"We’re going to have our very large US oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so" [1]
Reasoning like this is part of the reason why history keep repeating itself. Completely ignoring how previous US led decapitations turned out, and just hoping this time will be different.
It should not be contentious at this point, the US only cares about the geopolitical value of Venezuela, and if supporting another dictator helps towards this end, then that's what will happen.
The sheer ignorance . To form such an opinion, with such confidence and literally the only grounding is a few women he/she has dated. We are living in an idiocracy.
And the sentence "What really stood out to me was how intelligent Venezuelans are"... no shit, Sherlock, people are intelligent, we're all one species, what did he expect?
He expected what commonly tweeted “IQ by race / country” memes say on X, which is to say they regurgitate old debunked scientific racism that is now popular once again due to confirmation bias.
Significant IQ differences DO exist across countries, with key factors being education, health & nutrition, socioeconomic status, environmental factors (more controversial), the Flynn effect.
Dude, theres not much point in arguing that. You see this kind of 5th column in the aftermath of most popular revolutions, from Iran to Chavez in Venezuela. A whole horde of folks who were part of the previous elites (or more likely, their functionaries) who decamp en masse to the US, where they proceed to spout unhinged propaganda ad infinitum.
A tell tale is how they tend to completely overlook (to the point of pretending it isnt happening) the role of economic sanctions, blockades & other forms of coercive pressure on the economies of those countries. Instead, putting it all down to local actions by local actors.
There won't be much mention of any of the social improvements & economic uplift which Chavez in particular was able to do, before the external economic pressures became overbearing.
When you can control the narrative on both sides of the equation to this extent, kidnapping the leader of a sovereign (until today) country seems almost normal.
Jeffery Sachs summed it up best a couple of hours ago. The US is not even pretending to be a constitutionally-governed state any more, and this is just 1 sign of that.
I think I kind of understand why the Soviets were able to industrialize that fast and win an existential war against the mighty Wehrmacht.
The so called purges from late 20s to to the 30s were Stalin eliminating these 5th columnists.
The Soviets had a lot of Western assistance with industrializing. Ford in particular played a huge role in the Gorky factories.
The Wehrmacht lost because numbers kind of matter in war. When you look at the natural resources Russia had, the population disparity between Russia and Germany, and the size of territory the Germans attempted to conquer, it really wasn't a close contest at all.
Stalin's purges had absolutely nothing with removing any "5th Column." The White Movement was thoroughly defeated by 1921 as were the Mensheviks etc. Stalin purged his officer class because he was supremely paranoid. And while he killed many of the officers, many were sent to the gulags and recalled to service after the German invasion in 1941.
The entire concept of a 5th column is just fear-mongering by most countries who faced defeat due to their incompetence. And the term was used by countries to impose draconian controls and oppression.
One quick way to estimate a lower bound is to take the number of parameters and multiply it with the bits per parameter. So a model with 7 billion parameters running with float8 types would be ~7 GB to load at a minimum. The attention mechanism would require more on top of that, and depends on the size of the context window.
You'll also need to load inputs (images in this case) onto the GPU memory, and that depends on the image resolution and batch size.
If a person tries to communicate, but his stylistic choice of laziness (his own admission!) gets in the way of delivering his message, it is very tangibly useful information to tell, so that the writing effort could be better optimized for effect.
I wasn't even demanding/telling him what to do. I simply shared my observation, but it's up to him to decide if he wants to communicate better. Information and understanding is power.
Your choice. The worst thing is not knowing ("Why are not posts with reasonable opinions are being downvoted and not engaged with?"). Now you know (you are welcome) and it's your choice what to do with that information.
Telling of where the boundary of competence is for these models. And to show that these models aren't doing what most expect them to be doing, i.e. not counting legs, and maybe instead inferring information based on the overall image (dogs usually have 4 legs) to the detriment of find grained or out-of-distribution tasks.
Cosine similarity is the dot product of vectors that have been normalized to lie on the unit sphere. Normalization doesn't alter orthogonality, nor does it change the fact that most high‑dimensional vectors are (nearly) orthogonal.
They do.
It's just that for two vectors to be orthogonal it's the case as soon as they're orthogonal when projected down to any subspace; the latter means that if for example one coordinate is all they differ on, and it's inverse in that value between the two vectors, then these two vectors _are already orthogonal._
In d dimensions you can have d vectors that are mutually orthogonal.
Interestingly this means that for sequence lengths up to d, you can have precise positional targeting attention. As soon as you go to longer sequences that's no longer universally possible.
What happens if the Venezuelan people decide they want their oil profits to stay in Venezuela rather than flowing into oil company coffers? Will they have the "freedom" to choose that?
Don't get me wrong, Maduro being toppled is a positive in isolation, but it's still wait-and-see regarding what he gets replaced with.
"We’re going to have our very large US oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so" [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/03/trump-venezu...
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