"A country that has devoted virtually all of its national resources to the means of war has no alternative to war. If the only tool you have is a shotgun, the only business you can start is robbery."
I may be wrong, but I think right now, from reading stories of people looking at use AI and having poor experiences, AI is useful and effective for some tasks and not for others, and this is an intrinsic property - it won't get better with bigger models. You need a task which fits well with what AI can do, which is basically auto-complete. If you have a task which does not fit well, it's not going to fly.
Right: LLMs have a "jagged frontier". They are really good at some things and terrible at other things, but figuring out WHAT those things are is extremely unintuitive.
You have to spend a lot of time experimenting with them to develop good intuitions for where they make sense to apply.
I expect the people who think LLMs are useless are people who haven't invested that time yet. This happens a lot, because the AI vendors themselves don't exactly advertise their systems as "they're great at some stuff and terrible at other stuff and here's how to figure that out".
This is first book in a series of three, where the first and third have been published, the second is in fact going to be two volumes, of which the second volume is about to be published and the first is not yet out.
The book IMO is superb.
The history of it is very simple : the French rules Vietnam, extraordinarily badly, the locals wanted independence - that's all they wanted. An end to violence, exploitation and corruption. WW2 happened, the Japanese moved in, then out, the locals declared independence, the French came back, and they wanted to keep Vietnam. The French shanghaied the Americans into helping them militarily ("they're all communists!!!") and the Americans were naive/gullible and bought into it. The French eventually left, leaving the Americans carrying the can and with so much investment of time and prestige they couldn't just leave.
In all of this, the locals suffered in the most appalling and horrific ways, and ended up stuck with Communism (which none of them had any particular interest in, and which they later turned to because they needed support and that was all that was available).
Basically far as I can see it all kicked off with French colonialism. The locals simply wanted independence. The irony is the USA - the bastion of independence and freedom - ended up fighting against this and slaughtering huge numbers of people who simply wanted to run their own affairs.
USA is a good country, as countries go, but it has made mistakes, and when countries go to war, the practical consequences of the mistakes can well be enormous.
(I can compare this to say Putin's Russia, which is an appalling country and will kill you and your family if you get in their way and using violence and torture to keep people in line.)
The United States became involved in Vietnam due to a chain of events and a strategic mindset shaped by Cold War pressures. The fall of China to communism on October 1, 1949, the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, and the French defeat in Indochina culminating in the Geneva Accords on July 21, 1954, solidified a "with us or against us" worldview. This perspective, driven by fear of communist expansion, led the U.S. to see Vietnam as another Korea—a battleground where failing to act could result in a perceived loss to communism. Believing it had already "lost" China, the U.S. committed to Vietnam to prevent what it saw as another domino falling, reflecting a reactive and at times simplistic approach to global events.
> The irony is the USA - the bastion of independence and freedom - ended up fighting against this and slaughtering huge numbers of people who simply wanted to run their own affairs.
The US didn't fight against independence.
The French were long gone by 1956. Diem kicked them out of South Vietnam when he pushed Emperor Bao Di out. The French were quite salty about it, and actively worked to undermine what the US was doing thereafter.
The US has no interest in making South Vietnam a vassal state. It was nothing more than a bulwark against perceived communist expansion (incorrectly perceived). It devolved into a civil war between opposing Vietnamese parties, with superpowers backing each side.
Not intentionally, and I am not arguing that they did. I argue what the locals actually wanted was independence (and everyone else was more or less acting to prevent that, by whatever motives or means).
> The US has no interest in making South Vietnam a vassal state. It was nothing more than a bulwark against perceived communist expansion (incorrectly perceived). It devolved into a civil war between opposing Vietnamese parties, with superpowers backing each side.
Yes, except I would say the southern parties lacked actual genuine support from the locals. They were promoted by the USA because there had to be an indigenous party to develop into a stable country. The real non-Communist locals had been destroyed by the French.
> Not intentionally, and I am not arguing that they did. I argue what the locals actually wanted was independence (and everyone else was more or less acting to prevent that, by whatever motives or means).
I think that's a reasonable take.
> Yes, except I would say the southern parties lacked actual genuine support from the locals. They were promoted by the USA because there had to be an indigenous party to develop into a stable country. The real non-Communist locals had been destroyed by the French.
I guess I would ask at what point in time?
Prior to 1945, there were many pro-independence parties in Vietnam. Most were located in the North due to the proximity to China (and the freedom the civil war brought there to organizing activities). There was VNQDD who was relatively powerful, but was eliminated by the communists and it's vestiges eliminated after 1954.
The South was less organized and the communists were the leading pro-independence group. They were fought by the French, and yes, the French treated all pro-independence groups as enemies (which hurt them in the end as they may have had a chance at a semi-autonomous relationship with some of the groups).
After the Japanese left, Diem controlled the South and battled the communists quite successfully until the North decided to help them more directly (and ok more violence).
While Diem wasn't George Washington, he had a level of support when he was able to deliver peace and despite what the press says, wasn't anti-Buddhist (rather they were opposition political groups also vying for power). After a few coups and a questionable election, by 1970 Thieu was able to deliver on a functioning economy, relative peace and a lack of the worst democratic abuses, and had a level of support that could have continued had the war not escalated.
As studies of wars have shown, the vast majority of people are apolitical during war. 10% support one side, 10% the other, and 80% are just worried about their next meal and the safety of their family and will accept either.
And considering the number of South Vietnam who fled the war after 1975 (2M or 15%) and the remarkable last ditch battles that happened, there was maybe not support for Thieu, but their was support for the idea of an independent South Vietnam.
Germany is the only Western European country with an Eastern European capital. As a result, Berlin was poorer than the rest of the country, but this is no longer the case. Since reunification, Berlin has had the fastest growing economy in Germany and is now close to Hesse in terms of GDP per capita.
Berlin is odd... for several factors. Just looking at the last 100 years, I fail to see any capital (that was not directly a war zone) be: not capital, capital, divided, part of 2 countries, an exclave...
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