Indeed but we have veered far from Plato's school of thought ever since the dualism of Descartes and it was further reinforced by the rise in materialism following the "death of god" and the discovery of the atom.
I hear you on that, but it's not like Laozi's thought is particularly useful to Chinese capitalism, either. Certainly any remnant gestures towards the dialectics of Marx by the CCP are farcical. We can allow for some local variance, of course, while still seeing the vulgarization of the whole world, so to speak. I think it's important to appreciate that the seed of dialectical thought can never be vanquished; Kant accidentally paved the way for Hegel's abolition of Cartesian dualism, and Hegel had no problem making use of the German language, so seemingly divorced from Plato's Greek, to do that. Dialectical thought can't help but appear over and over again, no matter the language, because all language is a product of the real world.
Again, it would be a mistake to not afford some degree of autonomy to language. The question is to what degree language is free to structure the world. Ultimately any language, I believe, can be expanded to express whatever new ideas arise in society, so that it is the real conditions that have ultimate power "in the last instance".
I afford that "autonomy" (in the sense of a sponptaneous emergence of phenomena, not in the sense of having agency); nevertheless, thousands of years of culture going one way here and another way there lend themselves to pre-built apparati of perception. See other comments in this thread for a more articulated explanation of what I mean; I don't have the time to re-express it here.
I've always been averse to this sort of Jungian schema (it's a Freudian baggage I have -- Mourning and Melancholia has much value on the present topic!), but more and more I'm seeing how much wisdom was lost in the historic disavowal of myth and archetypal thought. Since having a child, my wife and I have been repeatedly stunned at how incapable our own parents are. I don't mean a mere absence of help with babysitting (although they suck at this, too), I mean they just have no idea how to deal with us or our kid as living beings. They shrink at the first sign of difficulty. They want absolutely no relationship with death. We've had to find new elders elsewhere; they really aren't easy to find but they do exists.
Offensive how? "Developing" and "things aren't so bad" are offensive because they obfuscate imperialist relations. That's the position of the theorists who use "Global North"/"South", anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South#...
I haven't read the link you posted because I want to expand on my initial reaction.
A layman who is not familiar with the reasons behind Global North/South would not think about imperialist relations. I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.
Global North/South makes no sense at all, again from a layman's perspective. From the original story:
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
When I see Australia in the southern hemisphere being characterised as "North", I think that the creator of this term is discriminating against countries they consider inferior. There is no room for growth here. A country being characterised as "South" will always be as such, because intuitively we know we can't switch geographies.
> I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.
"Developing" what, and to what end? The term itself sounds absolute, where in fact it implies a relative order, but doesn't give away what (arbitrary) properties you include in the comparison.
Take Gross National Happiness or the Happy Planet Index, for example. You could very well call countries with a low but slowly rising GNH "developing countries". USA is 122/152 in the HPI, which sounds about right, and probably not "developing" but declining.
The point is that the imperial West defines what is "good" and "bad", and from that point of reference uses terminology that implies an absoluteness; as another example, as if "long life" is a universal goal of humanity, when in fact other cultures prioritize community over individuals. (There's no point in valuing a "long life" when you believe in reincarnation.)
To discriminate between developed and developing countries also means you assume some countries are somewhat "finished" where others can play "catch up", which is not how global economies actually work: Capitalism requires winners and losers.
I come, rob your house, take away most of what you have, and call you "savage". I then give you "development aid", telling you how to spend it and make you dependent on my services and "assistance", calling you "developing". How does that feel? Are we interacting on eye level, or am I looking down on you?
Sure, you turn my home into a warzone and I have to flee, plus I may buy into your propaganda of a better life, so surely that's a good indication of... what? Developed vs. developing?
Good governance helps a lot even if you had previously suffered invasion, we’re occupied or were a colony: see Taiwan (invaded, occupied), Panama (invaded), USA (colony and invaded subsequently).
It’s doable but people will have to want it. It doesn’t come free and it doesn’t come by listening to charlatans like Marx and his peddlers who promise utopia at no cost but the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. From then on it should be all roses in a land of milk and honey. No, sorry, it takes lots of work, delayed gratification and multi-generational effort to get to a good place like Singapore did or even Chile relatively speaking. You need someone with strong singular vision a a populace willing to follow it through. Why even Salvador after decades of civil war is able to overcome its difficulties and now enjoy great personal safety -the best in the western hemisphere. A country doesn’t have to stay stuck in a bad place.
This perspective ignores the relationships and influence of other players inside and (even more) outside of the country. It is not "someone with strong singular vision". Specifically, historically, if the USA does not want you to prosper (because your independence threatens their objectives), you will not.
Right, in my experience it's a distinction that's offensive to the "Northern" camp that thinks about the disparity in terms of each country's independent "growth"/"progress"/development". It also offends "would-be Northerners", i.e. comprador/petty bourgeois individuals located geographically in the "South", for similar reasons. To complicate matters, dependency theorists were themselves petty bourgeois apologists of the Non-Aligned Movement. It's just that times have changed, just like how "American Indian" is preferred by the older generation because "Native" and "Indigenous" are impositions of liberalism, even though the newer generation may prefer the latter labels.
Personally I don't care what language is being used as long as the real conditions are being brought to light. Persecutory investigations into psychology on these matters are dead ends. The successful adoption of "Native" and "developing" did not liberate.
As an Australian, I do find it a bit perjorative for countries north of us (many of them in the northern hemisphere!) to be deemed the "global south", while we are excluded despite actually being the only inhabited continent entirely in the south. It just reminds one that nobody cares about the southern hemisphere, and that northern hemisphere types think anything south of the mediterranean is "south".
North/South doesn't have anything to do with it, anyway, as you alluded to. What people actually want to talk about is whether a country is a former colonial master, a former settler colony or a former extractive colony (or possibly multiple of these, as with e.g. the US).
Why? Because we are a small fraction of the population and economy of the planet.
How? Most of the population in the southern hemisphere is in ex-colonies from the north; our cultures are thus full of concepts that don't really work but we make do. Simple things like all the holidays being inappropriately aligned to the seasons, or the constellations in our skies being afterthoughts in the system, or of course maps being north up without a second thought.
The vertical strikes are pretty distinct. Either way you can't say "definitely". The AI probably wasn't even prompted in this way; without any specific investigation, and just because I exist in the symbolic world, I would guess that there is proximity between the embeddings for "factory worker" and "camp prisoner". That is the common rhetoric, isn't it?
How about this alternative challenge: ask it to write a poem in IPA (pronunciation language). I’d be surprised if this has ever been done pre-LLM, yet it excels at weird tasks like this.
You could probably just ask it to come up with 100 tasks to prove it’s not a stochastic parrot.
Yeah, I think "stochastic parrot" is a crappy phrase that obscures the mechanics of the LLM. Of course the LLM is capable of producing novel outputs, for some definition of novel. My only position here is that we can take any apparently magical outputs of the thing and, based on an understanding of how LLMs work, understand how they were likely produced. I think that sort of literacy will take us a long way.
> "AI" models are trained at the expense of underpaid workers filtering inputs of abhorrent content, and does not respect the owners of input content. Ethically, it sucks.
These ethics are definitely derived from a profit motive, however petty it may be.
> China, like Russia, started from an incredibly low baseline - largely caused by authoritarian power. A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy and genuinely improved people's lives. People are generally grateful, and they have reason to be.
Besides the ideological component here being embarrassingly incoherent (the bad was caused by "authoritarian power" in general; the good was caused by "a new authoritarian power" in particular) your facts are plain wrong. The low baseline was pre-Mao (and pre-Lenin) when famine, illiteracy, technological impoverishment, and labor immobility was the rule. Deng's opening up certainly was something, but it undoubtedly stood upon the shoulders of the Mao era. Even the WEF agrees: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/how-china-got-rich-4...
> But the “conventional wisdom” ignores the fact that — even inclusive of the serious mistakes, lost lives and lost years that some insist define the early decades after 1949 — the foundations laid during Mao’s rule, including land reform and redistribution, substantial investments in heavy industry, public health, literacy, electrification, and transportation gave China a substantial leg up. These developments positioned China for takeoff well ahead of the official inauguration of Reform and Opening in 1978. While Deng’s reforms catalyzed China’s economic takeoff, they built upon critical foundations established during Mao’s era, which are often overlooked.
Even the WEF is wrong, of course, because they do the usual thing of inflating the importance of GDP; GDP has virtually no applicability to a socialist economy and the "revitalization" you speak of was, as far as its quantitative measure, a magic trick. A literal capitalization upon decades of labor mobilization.
At some point relatively early in the Soviet revolution, recurring famine was abolished. Famine occurred about once a decade for the entirety of documented history. Then it stopped. The interesting thing isn't how famine occurred in the early 30s (or the 40s to a much lesser extent), it's how it was absolutely prevented from occurring since. Industrialization of agriculture, collectivization, and centralized grain distribution was the solution. You have to admit that it happened. It was the same with the Chinese revolution. My point is that this all happened before "opening up", and that it was part of the logic of socialism.
The Wikipedia’s article I linked in the previous comment has a good overview.
Also the list of famines worldwide [1] does’t confirm your statement with famine every 10 years. And especially there were very few famines with millions of dead from hunger before on the eastern eu territory - the one in 19xx was man-made in its entirety.
> From the beginning of the 11th to the end of the 16th century, on the territory of Russia for every century there were 8 crop failures, which were repeated every 13 years, sometimes causing prolonged famine in a significant territory.
(That was already right there in your Wikipedia link. Sources are more scattered regarding the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, but it's all there if you search for it. One thing I was just reminded of is that in the 19th century and up until 1917, the Russian Empire maintained communal granaries to combat recurring famine, but to no avail.)
They obviously meant famines in the location that is being discussed. Why would they be talking about worldwide famines? How would a famine in South America be relevant to the Soviets?
I did not say you are a product of western state depts. I was not speaking literally. Re-read the comment. Western state depts want you to be a reactionary. They didn’t invent the concept of being one. Bringing up your family doesn’t change any of that.
Are you aware of any efforts to apply DBSP's theory to a general programming language/environment? From my perspective, DDlog was the most inspiring project in the field of incremental computation, but it seems like all of these projects just lead to implementations of streaming databases or other similar commercial products that fit into Data™ pipelines (no offense). Incremental computation pops up everywhere, from databases to business logic to UI rendering and video game graphics, and I have this hunch that if the problem could be solved at a fundamental level and in an accessible way, we could have revolutionary gains for programmers and programs.
The reason DBSP and Differential Dataflow work so well is because they are specialized to relational computations. Relational operators have nice properties that allow evaluating them incrementally. Incremental evaluation for a general purpose language like Rust is a much, much harder problem.
FWIW, DBSP is available as a Rust crate (https://crates.io/crates/dbsp), so you can use it as an embedded incremental compute engine inside your program.
Indeed. I've experimented a bit with abusing DD/DBSP for my purposes by modeling various kinds of data structures in terms of Z-sets, but these efforts have not yielded very impressive results. :)
For how elegant DBSP is I still found the paper a tough nut to crack, and it really is one of the more accessible theoretical contributions in the space, at least from this grubby programmer's perspective... I hope to devote some time to study and play around more, but in the meantime I'm rooting for you!
(Not who you are replying to) Not sure if it’s specifically related to DBSP but checkout incremental DataFun (slide ~55 of https://www.rntz.net/files/stl2017-datafun-slides.pdf) and the paper cited there: A Theory of Changes for Higher Order Languages: Incrementalizing Lambda-calculi by Static Differentiation (Cai et. al, PLDI 2014).
reply