Agree. LLMs operate in the domain of language and symbols, but the universe contains much more than that. Humans also learn a great deal from direct phenomenological experience of the world, even without putting those experiences into words.
I remember a talk by Yann LeCun where he pointed out that in just the first couple of years of life, a human baby is exposed to orders of magnitude more sensory data (vision, sound, etc.) than what current LLMs are typically trained on. This seems like a major limitation of purely language-based models.
For such companies, France also offers generous R&D tax credits (Crédit Impôt Recherche): companies can recover roughly 30% of eligible R&D expenses incurred in France as a tax credit, which can eventually be refunded (in cash) if the company has no taxable profit.
I’m not sure it makes much sense to call this naive. When the issue is a moral one, conflicts like this are almost inevitable. Ethical convictions often collide with political or institutional decisions. If a company decides to work with the military and someone finds that fundamentally incompatible with their values, stepping away may simply be the only coherent option for them. It’s sometimes just moral consistency. Moral inconsistency can create deep inner conflict and real psychological distress.
This being said, many queer people (not only trans people) seem to develop particularly inclusive values, perhaps because they have personally experienced the consequences of harassment, exclusion, or violence. Having gone through that kind of experience can make someone more sensitive to the vulnerability of others.
UK isn't EU, especially when it comes to health system. I lived in the US for quite some time (from Fr), the healthcare is great... if you can afford an expensive health insurance AND pay some extra money when required. The avg US people can not pay and when you can not pay the experience is just far worth than terrible.
Interesting. Your comparison reminds me of something from Lacanian psychoanalysis: the idea that people often mistake themselves for the symbolic labels they occupy, their title for instance. Like a doctor who would praise himself for being a doctor, a president a president.
From that perspective, both versions of the Tao Te Ching line point to the same thing: what can be named, praised, or socially recognized isn’t the true underlying reality.
Different phrasing, but the same structural idea.
More generalized, any kind of symbol representing something is not the something. The social labelling is very accessible, true now and true then.
There’s a Zen koan about that (with Zen coming from Chang which came from a meeting of Buddhism and Taoism in China) — about the finger pointing to the moon, and how all but one student looked at the finger.
In a different example, there is the distinction of virtue signaling and virtue (the “Te” in “Tao Te Ching”)
I can’t access the article… but honestly, I’ve been asking myself the same question for the past ten years.
The best answer I’ve found is: not yet — but the current backlash and drift toward authoritarianism in many democracies is actually the sign that something real is shifting.
In a way, the situation looks weirdly similar to Europe before WWII. Democracies were starting to integrate some of the socialist ideas that had emerged in the 19th century, and the dominant forces of capitalism pushed back hard. They let fascists rise, sometimes even supported them. That led to a war, millions of deaths, and then a massive change of mindset: after WWII, every European country implemented strong social protection and regulation.
Today, the shift is less about social security and more about cultural transformation — the end of patriarchy, and with it the decline of imperialism and Western dominance. Those foundations started being seriously questioned in the 60s. The dominant forces are resisting because, deep down, they’ve already lost — there’s no going back. But as always, they can still cause immense damage on the way out. And yes, if they refuse to let go peacefully, it could lead to conflict, and a lot of casualties.
But after, democracy will make a come back. I may be too optimist.
The article's argument follows your track of logic but is much more pessimistic:
"Is liberal democracy, then, in terminal decline? The rise of Carney himself offers a glimmer of hope, fuelled as it was by a reaction against Trump. But electoral trends in Europe do not suggest a repeat. A broad-based recovery of the liberal order will probably depend on a turnaround in the underlying trends, and here the signs are less promising. Attempts to soften the impact of worsening demographics are routinely rejected by voters and parties on both left and right. And the most promising source of renewed economic dynamism — AI — is likely to worsen inequality and increase societal instability, further undermining faith in democracy and hastening the slide into a zero-sum world.
Events of the past year have shocked the democratic world out of its daze, but it is these more powerful and slow-moving forces that should be the lasting cause for concern. Trump may fade from view in a few years, but any expectation that the liberal order will snap back flies in the face of the evidence. The old system was one that worked under a particular set of conditions. Those conditions are no longer present."
Tariffs, invasions, threats of invasions, threats of invasions against allies, broken alliances due to threats of invasions, the International Criminal Court got banned from using Windows and Office because they were investigating our war crimes, suddenly everyone was interested in divesting from US tech stacks, BRICS got their own currency and trade system, China abandoned the petrodollar, the beginning of a widespread sell-off of US bonds
Perhaps for you. As a European, the shake-up came with the war in Ukraine. That this actually could happen, and could happen in other countries here, too.
Though, in the US, there seems to be some focus on what the country wants and does. The following I say more as a joke, but I wouldn't mind being bought by the US all that much (or "invade" as you say). In a way, US is the biggest ally anyway, after being incorporated it's unlikely that Russia would try anything.
Regarding Greenland, it has been Denmark's colony, who has kept the natives in check there. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to go through these injustices and choose a different parent country?
