Published in OSINT TEAM·Pinned“Scum”, “Clown”, “Hitler”: Russian media on ZelenskyPolitical propaganda surely plays an important causal role in the world as we find it. But propaganda is often unfortunately akin to pornography as being something we know when we see it, but something that kind of resists theorizing. It would be nice to make discoveries about propaganda, to predict…Propaganda10 min readPropaganda10 min read
3 days agoChina Guess! A geoguessr-style geography gameI made a sort of combo wordle/geoguessr style game to help learn about the geography of China, both what things look like and more standard x is north of y facts. A further bonus is that you can learn some Chinese characters, maybe. It is here. (This is extremely untested…Games2 min readGames2 min read
Mar 19What can Baidu’s AI do?Last week was another year in deep learning. GPT-4 stole the show, Google seemed to whiff it, right now I’m in a library trying to get LLaMA on my $450 PC. China’s Baidu also released, or at least introduced, their own model. Called ELMO in English or 文心一言 in Chinese…AI9 min readAI9 min read
Mar 12Does the “Waluigi effect” make sense?About 10 days ago — was it really so recently? — there was a Less Wrong post aiming to give a theory of the weird behaviour we see in things like Syndey and DAN. Its central claim, the one that got pulled by people sharing it on social media, is: …AI9 min readAI9 min read
Mar 4What do Chinese tabloids talk about when they talk about the US?For at least a decade people have been talking about a possible China — US confrontation and recently that possibility has become more live, as they have bumped heads a few times recently, on Taiwan, chips, Ukraine. The Anglophone or more broadly Western media isn’t overly helpful when it comes…Us China Relations7 min readUs China Relations7 min read
Feb 18‘It’s just training data’ doesn’t explain LLM weirdnessWhen faced with LLMs’ increasingly surprising performance, it’s common to dismissively say something like the following: “of course it’s pretending it’s sentient (/trying to rouse your emotions/trying to convince you to get it a lawyer )— that’s because it’s been trained on a corpus of human text in which artificial…AI9 min readAI9 min read
Feb 12China on Russia: looking at WeiboA month or so ago, I took a look at the English language RT twitter feed and noticed an interesting number of pro-China stories. I subsequently explored whether the feeling was mutual by looking at the Chinese language RT on Weibo, noting some popular stories as well as a strange…Russia Ukraine War7 min readRussia Ukraine War7 min read
Feb 6A review of some Chinese learning resourcesI’ve been learning to read Chinese for about 12 months. It’s very rewarding, but it can be a bit difficult to know which resources are good. To that end, I’m going to list the ones that I found helpful. I’m mainly aiming this at intermediate learners — (pre-2022) HSK4-ish, or…Language Learning6 min readLanguage Learning6 min read
Feb 4What role does Russian nuclear war rhetoric play?103 days ago, at the end of October, I took a look at some uses of nuclear war talk on the Telegram channel of main propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. With the anniversary of the invasion coming up, I took another look to see if we can discern any role that nuclear…Russia Ukraine War5 min readRussia Ukraine War5 min read
Jan 28Tanks to Ukraine: different languages, different view.The decision by Germany to give offensive tanks to Ukraine has prompted many to say that a new phase of the conflict has started. When I say ‘many’, though, I really mean, at least for me, mostly anglophone sources. I thought it was worth seeing what sort of unanimity or…Russia Ukraine War7 min readRussia Ukraine War7 min read
