The idea is compelling to consider though - I just saw a clip of comedian Romesh Ranganathan saying that a reason he hasn't cheated on his wife is lack of opportunity; another side of the same idea.
Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Most of us stay within our ethical lane, but then we don't have the money to afford a private island to abuse people on; we don't have to resist the temptation to incite an insurrection, or to shift gold markets by threatening a war ... perhaps we'd be tempted?
> Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Statistically, if we were living in WWII Germany, most of us would not become freedom fighters. We'd keep our head down and support the regime. I think most people like to think of themselves as the exception but that's just "cope".
It's said that Starship Troopers failed to do as well in USA because people thought it was pro-fascist propaganda ... it doesn't seem possible that could genuinely be the case.
I remember _movie critics_ clutching their pearls in disgust at the fascism. I was an autistic teen just out of a village and even I could see the satire. To this day I have no idea if they were reviewing in good faith, it still feels so far-fetched.
Starship Troopers (the movie) is a terrible example of satire because it fails to show anything substantially bad. When you present a society that's more ethical than real life, nobody's going to care if some people wear uniforms that look a bit like Nazi uniforms.
There is a genuine existential risk, and it's addressed in the best way possible. Military slavery ("conscription") is more evil than disenfranchisement, especially when citizenship is not required to live a good life. Nobody is tricked or coerced into signing up for military service. Potential recruits are even shown disabled veterans to make the risk more salient. There are no signs of racism or sexism.
Other objections are not supported by the film. There is no suggestion that the Buenos Aires attack is a false flag. I've seen people claim it's impossible for the bugs to do this, but it's a film featuring faster-than-light travel. The humans are already doing impossible things, so why can't the bugs? I've also heard complaints that there is no attempt at peace negotiations. There is no suggestion that peace is possible. It's possible among humans because most humans have a strong natural aversion to killing other humans. Real life armed forces have to go to great lengths to desensitize their troops to killing to prevent them from intentionally missing. But humans generally have no qualms about killing bugs, and the bugs in the movie never hesitate to kill humans.
The movie is an inspiring story about people making the right choices in a difficult situation. Some people look at it objectively, and some only react to the aesthetics. Those who look objectively understand it's actually faithful to the spirit of the book despite Verhoeven not intending that.
The Mormon missionaries settled on a bug planet. Human's attempting to colonize worlds already inhabited and getting killed is not an existential risk or threat. Choosing to go and exterminate the local population in response is not defense.
Assuming the Buenos Aires attack is from the bugs, it only happened after humans invaded multiple bug worlds. Since the bugs never seem to attempt to invade any human worlds, peace could have happened by just leaving the bugs alone and not attempting to take worlds from them. Paul Verhoeven grew up during WWII, so the idea of fascists exterminating the native population to make room, or Lebensraum, isn’t exactly a crazy idea.
The only hung I see about the asteroid was that Carmen’s collision (caused by her showing off) knocked the rock which caused it to hit Earth, where originally it may well have missed.
Seems reasonable (although clearly not the intent of the story and not a deliberate “false flag”)
This is all intentional. The film is emulating the type of film that would be produced by this fascist regime, of course it isn't going to include proof of the fascists being wrong. But we also don't see any evidence in support of their claims of an "existential threat" beyond the fascists claiming there is one. And since it's from the fascist perspective, the lack of evidence justifying their actions ends up supporting the idea that there is no real justification for their actions.
The movie's goal is showing the attractiveness of fascism and showing that people like you are incredibly open to fascist ideologies as long as the fascists have a scary "other" to put forward as an existential threat regardless of how real that threat truly is.
There definitely is. No one on screen looks into camera and says this directly, but the whole recurring "Would you like to know more?" bit is supposed to tip the viewer off that what they're watching is a product of the government's propaganda efforts.
I truly don't know how you can watch this [1] and conclude we're meant to fully trust them as the 100% honest truth.
The "would you like to know more" segments are inner nested stories. Those actually are presented as in-universe video, and qualify as epistolary narrative. But to claim that the movie as a whole is anti-fascist satire relies on the assertion that the whole movie is epistolary, which goes against the narrative conventions of film-making. Judging only by what we see on screen, we have to take it at face value. To do allow otherwise permits bizarre interpretations of any fiction you like, because you can always claim it's unreliable narration.
To differentiate between the potentially unreliable in-universe material and the conventional narrative of the rest. There's no on-screen evidence to justify a second level of nesting.
That confuses me because you seemingly aren't disagreeing with anything in the "unreliable in-universe material". The primary difference I see between those segments and the rest of the movie is simply tone.
The tone marks the difference between epistolary narration (which by convention may be unreliable) and omniscient narration (which by convention is always reliable). I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen. What we actually see is a society that's more ethical than any real world society in times of war. If Verhoeven didn't want us to believe that then he shouldn't have used the omniscient narration of a conventional action movie. Any movie that relies on external sources to convey its message has failed as a movie.
>I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen.
Poe's law suggests that what you're asking for is impossible, there will always be people unable to read sarcasm or parody. Knowing this, I believe Verhoeven included those "Would you like to know more?" segments as the equivalent of a ;-) or /s to indicate his intent. I'm sorry to be blunt, but obviously some of us were able to understand his message so attributing your own inability to see that message on a failure of Verhoeven and not yourself comes off as self-centered.
He could have introduced a second level of narrative nesting with a single title card at the beginning. Something like "United Citizen Federation presents: Heroes of the Bug Wars" would have made it clear. Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.
>Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.
Which brings us full circle back to my first reply to you, there is no evidence in the movie either way on the justification for their actions. You're reading that we must trust the fascists in the film due to film conventions is just as reliant on outside knowledge as my argument that we shouldn't trust the fascists in the film because they are fascists.
The evidence is shown on screen. We see the asteroid fired at Earth. We see Buenos Aires destroyed. We see the bugs killing the humans. If you call this unreliable narration it becomes impossible to discuss any fiction at all, because once you reject basic narrative conventions you can make up any nonsense you like and nobody can argue against it.
Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts. You could call it "vibe watching". If you look at what's actually happening, following the standard conventions of motion picture story-telling, the characters are not fascists. And if the director intended them to be fascists but omitted anything that would make that clear, he shouldn't be surprised when people watch it like a normal action movie.
No, we don't. The bugs have no technology. How could they send an asteroid from light-years away with enough speed and accuracy to hit Earth on any reasonable timeframe? It's not even a good lie. It's a story that strains credulity the second you actually think about its logistics. The only reason you believe it is that characters in the movie say it.
>We see Buenos Aires destroyed.
Sure, but asteroids also have natural origins. The government coopts the disaster for their own ends in an obvious mirroring of the Reichstag fire. The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what the crisis can be used to justify.
>We see the bugs killing the humans.
Sure, after the humans invade the bugs home. If you go on a hike, find a beehive, and then start poking it with a stick, no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
>Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts.
The government portrayed in the movie is fascistic because it shows a society that is entirely governed by military might and structure. The classroom scenes at the beginning of the movie discuss the failure of democracy and how that led to veterans taking control through force. We are also repeatedly told that basic rights of citizenship are only awarded to veterans. When they're at boot camp and all going around explaining their reasons for joining the military, one person says she wants to start a family and military service is the best path to getting a license for it. This is a highly structured and totalitarian society ruled by a military class. How would you describe that if it isn't "fascism"?
Once again, you seem to be guilty of the same thing you're accusing me of doing. The only evidence that this isn't a fascist society is the surface-level details of things like a bunch of happy high school students. Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
The bugs are shown firing projectiles to orbit. This is a setting with FTL travel; it's clearly not hard sci-fi. By the standard narrative conventions of soft sci-fi action movies, the bugs are capable of firing asteroids at Earth.
>The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant
It's critically important to the ethical justification for military response. According to the information actually presented in the movie, the destruction was deliberate murder of millions of civilians. Any other interpretation is fan-fiction.
>no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
They'd blame them for killing everybody they know. And that initial provocation was not the fault of the United Citizen Federation.
>Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
It has objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society.
I refuse to believe that you are actually engaging with the issues being discussed if you're claiming that needing a license to have children is "objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society." Your stubbornness has bested my patience, so I'm done here.
I support reproductive freedom. I oppose slavery. My opposition to slavery is stronger than my support for reproductive freedom. When there's a conflict between the two, reproductive freedom has to be sacrificed.
Anybody who didn't support raising a slave army to liberate the Chinese from their one-child policy implicitly agreed with me.
For fellow HN'ers reading this epically long back and forth:
sig appears to be taking the more mainstream stance that Starship Troopers is satire. This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
mrob is part of the coalition (that included many critics when the film was released) that asserts the film has no elements that are satirical. I admit pointing to specifics that show the satire is tough. "Do you want to know more?" was the biggest tipoff to me.
But my point is that this argument is still going on in wider society. Lots of people say satire, and lots don't. But the balance say it is:
> Since its release, Starship Troopers has been critically re-evaluated, and it is now considered a cult classic and a prescient satire of fascism and authoritarian governance that has grown in relevance.
> This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
Not "refuted", "disputed". If you "dispute" something you disagree with it. If you "refute" something you not only disagree with it but you conclusively prove you are correct.
They certainly haven't done the latter.
This word is very frequently used incorrectly. Sometimes on purpose by people (such as politicians) who would love to be able to actually refute some allegation, but instead just disagree with it and say that they refute it.
This seems.. wrong? From the director's mouth, confirming it's satire [0]
> Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism. Robocop was just urban politics – this was about American politics. As a European it seemed to me that certain aspects of US society could become fascistic: the refusal to limit the amount of arms; the number of executions in Texas when George W Bush was governor.
I really have no idea why Wikipedia says what it does. Someone should edit it.
I had no idea that people seriously think that the film isn't satire - I thought it was just people who had barely paid attention to it and weren't really giving it much thought that didn't spot the satirical elements throughout the film.
They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top.
Maybe part of it is due to how it was promoted - in the UK, it was promoted as satire, but I believe the USA promoted it as a straight action film.
> “I remember coming out of Heathrow and seeing the posters, which were great,” Verhoeven added. “They were just stupid lines about war from the movie. I thought, ‘Finally, someone knows how to promote this.’ In America, they promoted it as just another bang-bang-bang movie.”
> They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top
The big clue to me is when they visit the recruiter. The man is sitting at a desk and says something along the lines of "the galactic marines made me the man I am today", only for him to push back and reveal he's lost both his legs.
>Do you think you could publish that in a paper for ext ?
You seem to think it's not 'just' tensor arithmetic.
Have you read any of the seminal papers on neutral networks, say?
It's [complex] pattern matching as the parent said.
If you want models to draw composite shapes based on letter forms and typography then you need to train them (or at least fine-tune them) to do that.
I still get opposite (antonym) confusion occasionally in responses to inferences where I expect the training data is relatively lacking.
That said, you claim the parent is wrong. How would you describe LLM models, or generative "AI" models in the confines of a forum post, that demonstrates their error? Happy for you to make reference to academic papers that can aid understanding your position.
>You seem to think it's not 'just' tensor arithmetic.
If I asked you to explain how a car works and you responded with a lecture on metallic bonding in steel, you wouldn’t be saying anything false, but you also wouldn’t be explaining how a car works. You’d be describing an implementation substrate, not a mechanism at the level the question lives at.
Likewise, “it’s tensor arithmetic” is a statement about what the computer physically does, not what computation the model has learned (or how that computation is organized) that makes it behave as it does. It sheds essentially zero light on why the system answers addition correctly, fails on antonyms, hallucinates, generalizes, or forms internal abstractions.
So no: “tensor arithmetic” is not an explanation of LLM behavior in any useful sense. It’s the equivalent of saying “cars move because atoms.”
>It's [complex] pattern matching as the parent said
“Pattern matching”, whether you add [complex] to it or not is not an explanation. It gestures vaguely at “something statistical” without specifying what is matched to what, where, and by what mechanism. If you wrote “it’s complex pattern matching” in the Methods section of a paper, you’d be laughed out of review. It’s a god-of-the-gaps phrase: whenever we don’t know or understand the mechanism, we say “pattern matching” and move on, but make no mistake, it's utterly meaningless and you've managed to say absolutely nothing at all.
And note what this conveniently ignores: modern interpretability work has repeatedly shown that next-token prediction can produce structured internal state that is not well-described as “pattern matching strings”.
Transformers trained on Othello or Chess games (same next token prediction) were demonstrated to have developed internal representations of the rules of the game. When a model predicted the next move in Othello, it wasn't just "pattern matching strings", it had constructed an internal map of the board state you could alter and probe. For Chess, it had even found a way to estimate a player's skill to better predict the next move.
There are other interpretability papers even more interesting than those. Read them, and perhaps you'll understand how little we know.
>That said, you claim the parent is wrong. How would you describe LLM models, or generative "AI" models in the confines of a forum post, that demonstrates their error? Happy for you to make reference to academic papers that can aid understanding your position.
Nobody understands LLMs anywhere near enough to propose a complete theory that explains all their behaviors and failure modes. The people who think they do are the ones who understand them the least.
What we can say:
- LLMs are trained via next-token prediction and, in doing so, are incentivized to discover algorithms, heuristics, and internal world models that compress training data efficiently.
- These learned algorithms are not hand-coded; they are discovered during training in high-dimensional weight space and because of this, they are largely unknown to us.
- Interpretability research shows these models learn task-specific circuits and representations, some interpretable, many not.
- We do not have a unified theory of what algorithms a given model has learned for most tasks, nor do we fully understand how these algorithms compose or interfere.
I made this metaphor from my understanding of your comment.
Imagine we put a kid in a huge library of book who doesn't know how to write/read and knows nothing about what letter means etc. That kid stayed in the library and had a change for X amount time which will be enough to look over all of them.
what this will do is that not like us but somehow this kid managed to create patterns in the books.
After that X amount of time, we asked this Kid a question. "What is the capital of Germany?"
That kid will just have it is on kind of map/pattern to say "Berlin". Or kid might say "Berlin is the capital of the Germany" or "Capital of Germany is Berlin." The issue here is that we do not have the understanding of how this kid came of with the answer or what kind of "understanding" or "mapping" being used to reach this answer.
The other part basically shows we do not fully understand how LLM works is: Ask a very complex question to an AI. Like "explain me the mechanics of quantum theory like I am 8 years old".
1- Everytime, it will create differnt answer. Main point is the same but the letters/words etc would be different. Like the example I give above.There are unlimited type of answer AI can give you.
2- Can anyone in the Earth - a human - without a technology access for have unlimited amount of book/paper to check whatever info he needs - tell us the exact sentence/words will LLM use? No.
Then we do not have fully understand of LLM.
You can create a linear regression model and give it 100 people data and all these 100 people are blue eyed. Then give 101 person and ask it to predict the eye color. You already know the exact answer. It will be %100.
I think what you two are going back and forth on is the heated debate in AI research regarding Emergent Abilities. Specifically, whether models actually develop "sudden" new powers as they scale, or if those jumps are just a mirage caused by how we measure them.
Not the parent poster, but I also still use telnet. For me it's "Ancient", I have a few retired SPARC and PA-RISC boxes that run their period appropriate OSes as a hobby. Telnet/rlogin is the more reliable method to get into them remotely (just over the LAN).
They're on a LAN behind a NAT Router/Firewall, and I don't always keep them powered up (I'm not that insane) so I really don't have a concern for them.
Some of the more modern/high-performance examples I have run NetBSD with modern sshd and modern ciphers, but you can tell it's a bit of a workout for them.
As you suggest, it's clearly to curtail free speech further; but in a way that their supporters can claim isn't fascist because 'it's the companies doing it not the government'.
We do really need non-USA based social media, stat.
So Discord only just survived financially because of heavy fines imposed from their earlier breach of trust? All their C-suite were fined commensurate with their remunerations+wealth?
In my case, it was reportedly (for MS) an IP associated with mine (same hosting provider) had previously been used to send spam.
My domain is decades old, never sent any spam, and I whitelisted it .. but nope, my host wasn't perfect.
This was some time ago now, but it looks like they've still not adopted proper whitelisting.
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