#stochastic examples

[infoanalysishub]

Stochastic Meaning, Definition, Pronunciation, Examples & Usage

Discover the full meaning of stochastic, its pronunciation, definitions, synonyms, antonyms, origin, grammar rules, examples, medical and scientific uses, and much more in this detailed comprehensive guide. Stochastic Pronunciation: /stəˈkæs.tɪk/IPA: [stəˈkæs.tɪk] Definition of Stochastic Adjective Involving or characterized by a random probability distribution or pattern that may be…

[edenfenixblogs]

Date: 1/21/25

Note: I’m so depressed. This is such a good example of how both right wing antisemitism functions and how left wing antisemitism functions.

AOC’s response to the alarming rise in antisemitism + Elon Musk doing a my heart goes out to you into facist salute thing

Is too…

Take the opportunity to discredit the country’s oldest organization devoted to combatting antisemitism.

Regardless of if you think the ADL made the right call here or not- the ADL is operating in crisis mode. They (like all of us Jews) are in way over their heads, and it is sooooo not AOC’s place to criticize how they chose to respond.

As a gentile- you do not get a say in how Jews and Jewish organizations respond to antisemitism.

Sit the fuck down.

[thestudentempanada]

June 3, 2025, the Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return Group at the University of Washington just added their name to the Coalition to Free Elias Rodriguez, the man who murdered two outside the Capital Jewish Museum:

This initiative asserts that violence against zionists is not just inevitable, but a moral obligation, and so Elias Rodriguez should be freed.

Here are some excerpts from the text they signed off on:

"Elias Rodriguez’s act was fully justified, at that place where legal and moral duties meet."

"As imperialism has made the entire world its battlefield, it is justified to fight it, by any means necessary, without regard for geography. This holds especially true for those of us struggling behind enemy lines, inside the US..."

"This is the point at which those legal obligations, derogated and left unfulfilled by those responsible to them, fall to the free people of the world to fulfill. Elias Rodriguez exacted a consequence... May it redound to teach a lesson and set an example."

Within the context, it's pretty clear that the signatories are calling for more incidents of stochastic terror like the shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum.

They should not be on college campuses. Incitement to violence is a crime.

[dehautdesert]

I think so many people have an issue with Cinta's death not because she's a lesbian who died but because every single step of the way there felt so contrived and poorly written.

(a) First she gets a scene in which she's open and vulnerable with her feelings in a way we've never seen her be before (and that at times almost feels contradictory to how she was in S1), with no explanation or clarification of why and how she got to that point.

Syril, for example, gets to have big jumps in his character development because his is a straight path from A to B - you can deduce pretty much everything that happened in between from his state in the previous episode we saw him in and then the state he's in during the current episode. Cinta is not like that - we don't know enough to understand what happened to her, or why she changed, and now she's dead so we never will. So the big emotional scene feels like a way to make her death sadder instead of meaningful character development. Which feels cheap.

(b) The circumstances of her death also feel kind of contrived and rushed - there isn't a shootout or a big dangerous moment, there's one shot being fired and it randomly hits her, out of dozens of other people there, from a great distance. And then she's dead on the spot. She wasn't even killed by the Imps, she was killed by a random glitch in the plan. Brasso's death landed better because that WAS a big dangerous action scene with tension building up over a long period of time, so you can buy it that he died. Even Bix's rape feels more like a natural corollary of the Empire being the Empire - some of these authoritarian fascist fucks will obviously try to take advantage of their position to sexually assault people - Cinta's death just has too many stochastic elements to make it land naturally, especially when combined with point (a) that heightens the cheap one-two of giving a character an emotional scene and then killing them off ten minutes later.

(c) The denouement of the episode focuses more on the Gorman guy and his responsibility for Cinta's death and his feelings about all that than it does on Vel. In fact, it seems like Cinta's death is part of a larger point the writers are trying to make about inexperience and disorganization and refusal to follow orders in rebel groups - except this point would have worked way better, imho, if it was one of the guy's own friends who died. The fact that it's Cinta specifically feels like the least punchy choice if it's the guy or the rebels' incompetence leading to unnecessary deaths that we want to focus on (and so far we've only focused on that - perhaps this'll change in the following episodes and Vel will get more character development, but we don't know that from our current vantage point). Trying to do a two-in-one deal where we make this point and ALSO further Vel's character arc just lands wrong and makes everything underwhelming and unsatisfying.

People are really taking issue with the way everything that happens around her death feels contrived and fabricated to generate pathos and artificial drama, because not only does it make for mid storytelling, it's also what reminds them of the "bury your gays"/fridge the love interest plotlines, where the deaths feel similarly cheap and contrived and random. It doesn't matter that it technically isn't a case of bury your gays, it's still badly written.

[eightyonekilograms]

The funny thing about non-technical people discussing generative AI is that they sort of get it wrong in both directions: the models themselves are way more capable than people understand (no, they are not stochastic parrots and no they're not just regurgitating the training data), but at the same time many parts of the stack are dumber than is commonly known. Just to pick one example, RAG is way stupider than you think. Don't let anyone hoodwink you into believing RAG is some sophisticated technique for improving quality, it's a fancy term for "do a google search and then copy-paste the output into the prompt". Sometimes it's literally that.

I think soon we will have a good solution to the issue of language models being bad at knowing how to look up and use structured data, but RAG is definitely not it. It's the "leeches and bone saws" era of LLMs.

[misfitwashere]

TIMOTHY SNYDER

FEB 13

Americans have a certain idea of freedom. We are fine just the way we are and the only problem are the barriers in the outside world. In this mental world, Musk’s hollowing out of the government can seem justified. Trump’s betrayal of friends and destruction of alliances can seem convenient. We will be great again by being all alone, with no one to trouble us.

This fantasy leads right to tragedy. It sets the stage for the weak strongman.

Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world.

The strongman is weak because no one beyond the United States has anything to want (or fear) from the self-immolation. And weak because Trump submits to foreign aggression, putting waning American power behind Russia.

The weak strongman undermines the rules, but cannot replace them with anything else. He creates the image of power by his rhetorical imperialism: America will control Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Gaza, etc. From there, it is hard to say that others are wrong when they invade other countries. The weak strongman is left endorsing other people’s invasions, as with Russia and Ukraine. He lacks the power to resist them. And he lacks the power to coerce them. And, ironically, he lacks the power to carry out wars himself. He lacks the patience, and he lacks the instruments.

Many Americans fear Trump, and so imagine that others must. No one beyond America fears Trump as such. He can generate fear only in his capacity as neighborhood arsonist, as someone who destroys what others have created. America’s friends are afraid not of him but of what we all have to lose. America’s enemies are not frightened when Trump kicks over the lantern and sets things on fire. Quite the contrary: he is doing exactly what they want.

Trump plays a strongman on television, and he is a talented performer. But the strength consists solely of the submissiveness of his audience. His performance arouses a dream of passivity: Trump will fix it, Trump will get rid of our problems, and then we will be free. And of course that kind of Nosferatu charisma is a kind of strength, but not one that can be brought to bear to solve any problems, and not one that matters in the world at large. Or rather: it matters only negatively. As soon as Trump meets someone with a better dictator act, like Putin, he submits. But he can only enable Putin. He can’t really even imitate him.

Trump’s supporters might think that we don’t need friendships because the United States can, if necessary, intimidate its enemies without help. This has already been proven wrong. Trump can make things worse for Canada and Mexico, in the sense that a sobbing boy taking his ball home makes things worse. But he cannot make them back down. Trump has not intimidated Russia. He has been intimidated by Russia.

The cruelty that makes Trump a strongman at home arose from the destruction of norms of civil behavior and democratic practice. Unlike any other American politician before him, Trump has scorned the law and used hate speech to deter political opponents here. For years he has used his tweets to inspire stochastic violence. This intimidates some Americans. It has, for example, led to a kind of self-purge of the Republican Party, opening the way for Trump, or in fact for Musk, to rule with the help of tamed and therefore predictable cadres. The effect of this is that people who have submitted to Trump see him as a strongman. But what they are experiencing is in fact their own weakness. And their own weakness cannot magically become strength in the wider world. Quite the contrary.

Stochastic violence cannot be applied to foreign leaders. Trump has said that he can stop the war in Ukraine. He wrote a tweet directed at Vladimir Putin; but the capital letters and exclamation points did not change the emotional state of the Russian leader, let alone Russian policy. And no one in Irkutsk is going to threaten or hurt Putin because Donald Trump wrote something on the internet. Something that works in the United States is not relevant abroad. In fact, the tweet was a sign of weakness, since it was not followed by any policy. Putin quite rightly saw it as such. Trump and his cabinet now repeat Putin’s talking points about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

One could generously interpret Trump’s tweet to Putin threatening sanctions and such as an act of policy. I saw conservatives do that, and I would have been delighted had they been right. But I fear that this was just the characteristic American mistake of imagining that, because Americans react submissively to Trump’s words, others must as well. For words to matter, there has to be policy, or at least the possibility that one might be formulated. And for there to be policy, there have to be institutions staffed with competent people. And Trump’s main action so far, or really Musk’s action so far, has been to fire exactly the people who would be competent to design and implement policy. Many of the people who knew anything about Ukraine and Russia are gone from the federal government.

And now Trump is trying to make concessions to Russia regarding issues directly related to Ukrainian sovereignty on his own, without Ukraine, and indeed without any allies. He is showing weakness on a level unprecedented in modern US history. His position is so weak that it is unlikely to convince anyone. Trump is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. The wolves can tell the difference. Russians will naturally think that they can get still more.

Kyiv-Zaporizhzhia train, TS

Ukrainians, for that matter, have little incentive to give up their country. Trump can threaten them with cutting US arms, because stopping things is the only power he has. But Ukrainians must now expect that he would do that anyway, given his general subservience to Putin. If the US does stop support for Ukraine, it no longer has influence in how Ukraine conducts the war. I have the feeling that no one in the Trump administration has thought of that.

It is quite clear how American power could be used to bring the war to an end: make Russia weaker, and Ukraine stronger. Putin will end the war when it seems that the future is threatening rather than welcoming. And Ukraine has no choice but to fight so long as Russia invades. This is all incredibly simple. But it looks like Trump is acting precisely as is necessary to prolong the war and make it worse.

Thus far he and Hegseth have simply gone public with their agreement with elements of Russia’s position. Since this is their opening gambit, Russia has every incentive to keep fighting and to see if they can get more. The way things are going, Trump will be responsible for the continuing and escalation of the bloodshed, quite possibly into a European or open global conflict. He won’t get any prizes for creating the conditions for a third world war.

It’s an obvious point, but it has to be made clearly: no one in Moscow thinks that Trump is strong. He is doing exactly what Russia would want: he is repeating Russian talking points, he is acting essentially as a Russian diplomat, and he is destroying the instruments of American power, from institutions through reputation. No American president can shift an international power position without policy instruments. And these depend on functioning institutions and competent civil servants. In theory, the United States could indeed change the power position by decisively helping Ukraine and decisively weakening Russia. But that theory only becomes practice through policy. And it is not hard to see that Musk-Trump cannot make policy.

Even should he wish to, Trump can not credibly threaten Russia and other rivals while Musk disassembles the federal government. Intimidation in foreign affairs depends upon the realistic prospect of a policy, and policy depends, precisely, on a functioning state.

Let us take one policy instrument that Trump mentioned in his tweet about Putin: sanctions. Under Biden, we had too few people in the Department of the Treasury working on sanctions. That is one reason they have not worked as well against Russia as one might have hoped. To make sanctions work, we would need more people on the job, not fewer. And of course we would also need foreign powers to believe that Treasury was not just an American billionaire’s plaything. And that will be hard, because their intelligence agencies read the newspapers.

The United States cannot deal with adversaries without qualified civil servants in the departments of government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. All of these are being gutted and/or run by people who lack anything vaguely resembling competence.

Americans can choose to ignore this, or to interpret it only in our own domestic political terms. But it is obvious to anyone with any distance on the situation that the destruction of the institutions of power means weakness. And it creates a very simple incentive structure. The Russians were hoping that Trump would return to power precisely because they believe that he weakens the United States. Now, as they watch him (or Musk) disassemble the CIA and FBI, and appoint Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, they can only think that time is on their side.

The Russians might or might not, as it pleases them, entertain Trump’s idea of ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Even if they accept the ceasefire it will be to prepare for the next invasion, in the full confidence that a United States neutered by Musk-Trump will not be able to react, that the Europeans will be distracted, and that the Ukrainians will find it harder to mobilize a second time. 

Trump is not only destroying things, he is being used as an instrument to destroy things: in this case, used by Russia to destroy a successful wartime coalition that contained the Russian invasion and prevented a larger war.

What is true for Russia also holds for China. The weak strongman helps Beijing. Time was not really on China’s side, not before Trump. There was no reason to think that China would surpass the United States economically, and therefore politically and militarily. That had been the great fear for decades, but by the time of the Biden administration the trend lines were no longer so clear, or indeed had reversed. But now that Trump (or rather Musk) has set a course for the self-destruction of American state power, Beijing can simply take what it would once have had to struggle to gain, or would have had to resign from taking.

A weak strongman brings only losses without gains. And so the descent begins. Destroying norms and institutions at home only makes Trump (or rather Musk) strong in the sense of making everyone else weak. In our growing weakness, we might be all tempted by the idea that our strong man at least makes us a titan among nations. 

But the opposite is true. The world cannot be dismissed by the weak strongman. As a strongman, he destroys the norms, laws, and alliances that held back war. As a weakling, he invites it.

[banrionceallach]

I used to write a moderately popular HP/Good Omens crossover. I started it before JKR made transphobia her entire personality.

I decided to stop writing it in 2021 when I could no longer justify engaging with HP in any way, because making any kind of content for it, even transformative content, contributed to JKR's money pile, even just indirectly.

I left the fic up, because people had got enjoyment out of it and I was proud of the effort that went into creating it, but I left a note on the fic explaining exactly why I personally could no longer engage with HP, even though I had fun writing the fic and really missed doing so.

Most people who read the fic either weren't that invested in it and so moved on with a shrug, or were invested but understood that HP was, to quote a tumblr post 'just covered in the fucking ooze'.

But every now and then I get well-meant comments along the lines of: I want more of this fic, please continue it, it's not harming trans people to continue engaging with HP, you can solve the problem just by adding trans representation to your fic! You can engage with HP all you like as long as you don't directly buy things!

And yes, I can see that argument has a couple of valid poins. Transformative art is one of the points of fan fic. And if the author has been dead for donkey's years and is no longer using the income from their creation to get people oppressed and killed, then I'd agree.

I can, just for example, engage with works by HP Lovecraft and quite like transformative works based on his original material. (Salute to the monsterfuckers!) Because he is six-feet-under and me commissioning art of sexy cthulu in no way benefits him.

But JKR is alive, wealthier than god, and actively engaging in stochastic terrorism against trans people. It is not the same.

And so the undertone to these comments, whether intended or not, is 'can't you compromise on people's safety and human rights? Just a little? Pweez? My personal entertainment is important!'

Do the commenters intend this? No, I don't think so. I think their argument is made in good faith.

But the comments, like HP, are just covered in the fucking ooze.

To those commenters, I am sorry, believe me. It is the most minor, not even microscopic-violin-worthy of problems, but I do resent the fact that JKRs shite spoiled an act of creation for me. I understand that it does suck when you lose something that brought you joy.

But she is helping to get people killed.

There are so many other authors out there who have brilliant stories and are not using their earnings to hurt trans people.

Please try them instead.

[sunflowerdigs]

I've been keeping up with the Nex Benedict case and while I think there are sources that better describe the anti-trans rhetoric pushed by the school and Oklahoma legislature (like this one and this one, surprisingly, given its history), I think this article is the best one for actual facts about the case. Not calling an ambulance was actually in line with school policy, but the policy itself seems...questionable. Basically, the school was able to tell Nex's parents "yeah, we're not going to call an ambulance and send them to the hospital, but we strongly recommend that you do". Which...wtf? If your position is that you strongly recommend that a child with a head injury go to a hospital, just send them? Additionally, not automatically filing a police report is also in line with school protocol - current policy is for the school to give parents/students the option to file and to then schedule a time for them to do so if they wish. What's interesting is that Nex's parents spoke to a school resources police officer at the hospital they drove Nex to after the fight, which...makes me wonder whether the school actually offered them the option to file the report or whether the hospital did. Either way, I saw some comments online indicating that the school is a hotbed of bullying that the administration takes no responsibility for, which seems in line with its policies (and with putting self-admitted stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik on its state library advisory board - what a nightmare). No one has been charged yet because a cause of death has yet to be determined (they're waiting for a tox screen) but hopefully, whatever they find in the autopsy will point clearly to the bullies and they'll be punished. More importantly, though, the school administration needs to be held accountable and made an example of, imo.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Timothy Snyder at Thinking about…:

Americans have a certain idea of freedom. We are fine just the way we are and the only problem are the barriers in the outside world. In this mental world, Musk’s hollowing out of the government can seem justified. Trump’s betrayal of friends and destruction of alliances can seem convenient. We will be great again by being all alone, with no one to trouble us. This fantasy leads right to tragedy. It sets the stage for the weak strongman. Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world.

The strongman is weak because no one beyond the United States has anything to want (or fear) from the self-immolation. And weak because Trump submits to foreign aggression, putting waning American power behind Russia. The weak strongman undermines the rules, but cannot replace them with anything else. He creates the image of power by his rhetorical imperialism: America will control Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Gaza, etc. From there, it is hard to say that others are wrong when they invade other countries. The weak strongman is left endorsing other people’s invasions, as with Russia and Ukraine. He lacks the power to resist them. And he lacks the power to coerce them. And, ironically, he lacks the power to carry out wars himself. He lacks the patience, and he lacks the instruments. Many Americans fear Trump, and so imagine that others must. No one beyond America fears Trump as such. He can generate fear only in his capacity as neighborhood arsonist, as someone who destroys what others have created. America’s friends are afraid not of him but of what we all have to lose. America’s enemies are not frightened when Trump kicks over the lantern and sets things on fire. Quite the contrary: he is doing exactly what they want.

Trump plays a strongman on television, and he is a talented performer. But the strength consists solely of the submissiveness of his audience. His performance arouses a dream of passivity: Trump will fix it, Trump will get rid of our problems, and then we will be free. And of course that kind of Nosferatu charisma is a kind of strength, but not one that can be brought to bear to solve any problems, and not one that matters in the world at large. Or rather: it matters only negatively. As soon as Trump meets someone with a better dictator act, like Putin, he submits. But he can only enable Putin. He can’t really even imitate him. Trump’s supporters might think that we don’t need friendships because the United States can, if necessary, intimidate its enemies without help. This has already been proven wrong. Trump can make things worse for Canada and Mexico, in the sense that a sobbing boy taking his ball home makes things worse. But he cannot make them back down. Trump has not intimidated Russia. He has been intimidated by Russia. The cruelty that makes Trump a strongman at home arose from the destruction of norms of civil behavior and democratic practice. Unlike any other American politician before him, Trump has scorned the law and used hate speech to deter political opponents here. For years he has used his tweets to inspire stochastic violence. This intimidates some Americans. It has, for example, led to a kind of self-purge of the Republican Party, opening the way for Trump, or in fact for Musk, to rule with the help of tamed and therefore predictable cadres. The effect of this is that people who have submitted to Trump see him as a strongman. But what they are experiencing is in fact their own weakness. And their own weakness cannot magically become strength in the wider world. Quite the contrary. Stochastic violence cannot be applied to foreign leaders. Trump has said that he can stop the war in Ukraine. He wrote a tweet directed at Vladimir Putin; but the capital letters and exclamation points did not change the emotional state of the Russian leader, let alone Russian policy. And no one in Irkutsk is going to threaten or hurt Putin because Donald Trump wrote something on the internet. Something that works in the United States is not relevant abroad. In fact, the tweet was a sign of weakness, since it was not followed by any policy. Putin quite rightly saw it as such. Trump and his cabinet now repeat Putin’s talking points about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One could generously interpret Trump’s tweet to Putin threatening sanctions and such as an act of policy. I saw conservatives do that, and I would have been delighted had they been right. But I fear that this was just the characteristic American mistake of imagining that, because Americans react submissively to Trump’s words, others must as well. For words to matter, there has to be policy, or at least the possibility that one might be formulated. And for there to be policy, there have to be institutions staffed with competent people. And Trump’s main action so far, or really Musk’s action so far, has been to fire exactly the people who would be competent to design and implement policy. Many of the people who knew anything about Ukraine and Russia are gone from the federal government.

This piece from Timothy Snyder is a solid one.

[feelingbluepolitics]

On the subject of what is foreseeable.

trump has been attacking wives and families for a long time. Just two examples: 2018, Jill McCabe, wife of Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director trump fired days before his pension would have vested; 2023, Judge Merchan's wife and daughter. This article includes other examples:

It's part of trump's long-term persona that he doesn't have to follow any rules -- not the Constitution of the United States of America, and not the old school mafia prescript that families -- the women and children -- should not be harmed.

Currently, trump is again gagged from attacking Judge Engoran's law clerk. So now he's been attacking Engoran's wife. Of course, the attacks are malicious lies. That's a given. Judges with integrity are very careful to avoid any appearance of impropriety in using their position and power to their own benefit in any way. (Obviously, some judges, like Roberts, Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito, do not meet this standard.)

trump can assess correctly that none of the judges involved in his "legal challenges" (a favorite media euphemism, which likely enourages trump), will explicitly prohibit him from attacking themselves or their families.

Plenty of people opine that it is stupid for trump to antagonize the judges.

Plenty of people note that trump is well aware of his power as a stochastic terrorist, with "credible threats" swamping those he spotlights, or rather, targets:

And plenty of people recite that trump's favorite legal defense strategy is, "Delay, delay, delay." (One big delay would do.)

More decent people -- not just trump's base -- should be considering that trump would be very pleased if one of his followers physically attacks Judge Engoran's wife, or makes an actual attempt.

No matter how much integrity a judge has, no one could see any judge as impartial whose family member was literally attacked as a consequence of trump's manipulations.

trump would like a mistrial declared. It seems evident that he is, in his stochastic terrorist way, trying for one. It's even more disgusting that trump's base would declare this a win.

[tanadrin]

LLMs and their ilk seem useful for exploring complex, uncertain domains by narrowing down the search space in useful ways, and really useful for injecting a useful bit of stochastic variation into contexts where correctness is totally irrelevant, but fundamentally useless for looking stuff up. because even if it's correct 99% of the time, it does not (cannot?) signal where it might be incorrect, and if you are bothering to look stuff up it is presumably because you care about correctness, and not just like. verisimilitude.

the example i keep thinking about is using them to do research for historical fiction. if you are writing historical fiction, and you care enough about detail to do research, it seems to me like you care that you present the setting you are writing in accurately, and not just in an accurate-seeming way. so idk. maybe some people feel getting that kind of detail 99% right is fine, but 75% or w/e they might get with no research at all is just unacceptable? but even then i assume the domains LLMs hallucinate in is going to depend on their training data, and in some areas they are going to perform a lot worse than in others, and you don't really know what those areas are in advance. so maybe you're only getting it 50% or 25% right. i would find that level of uncertainty terribly frustrating.

it would be great if we had an easy-to-use natural language interface for google or w/e, but we don't. we have something that is good at acting like an easy-to-use natural language interface for google. important distinction!

[mariacallous]

Americans have a certain idea of freedom. We are fine just the way we are and the only problem are the barriers in the outside world. In this mental world, Musk’s hollowing out of the government can seem justified. Trump’s betrayal of friends and destruction of alliances can seem convenient. We will be great again by being all alone, with no one to trouble us.

This fantasy leads right to tragedy. It sets the stage for the weak strongman.

Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world.

The strongman is weak because no one beyond the United States has anything to want (or fear) from the self-immolation. And weak because Trump submits to foreign aggression, putting waning American power behind Russia.

The weak strongman undermines the rules, but cannot replace them with anything else. He creates the image of power by his rhetorical imperialism: America will control Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Gaza, etc. From there, it is hard to say that others are wrong when they invade other countries. The weak strongman is left endorsing other people’s invasions, as with Russia and Ukraine. He lacks the power to resist them. And he lacks the power to coerce them. And, ironically, he lacks the power to carry out wars himself. He lacks the patience, and he lacks the instruments.

Many Americans fear Trump, and so imagine that others must. No one beyond America fears Trump as such. He can generate fear only in his capacity as neighborhood arsonist, as someone who destroys what others have created. America’s friends are afraid not of him but of what we all have to lose. America’s enemies are not frightened when Trump kicks over the lantern and sets things on fire. Quite the contrary: he is doing exactly what they want.

Trump plays a strongman on television, and he is a talented performer. But the strength consists solely of the submissiveness of his audience. His performance arouses a dream of passivity: Trump will fix it, Trump will get rid of our problems, and then we will be free. And of course that kind of Nosferatu charisma is a kind of strength, but not one that can be brought to bear to solve any problems, and not one that matters in the world at large. Or rather: it matters only negatively. As soon as Trump meets someone with a better dictator act, like Putin, he submits. But he can only enable Putin. He can’t really even imitate him.

Trump’s supporters might think that we don’t need friendships because the United States can, if necessary, intimidate its enemies without help. This has already been proven wrong. Trump can make things worse for Canada and Mexico, in the sense that a sobbing boy taking his ball home makes things worse. But he cannot make them back down. Trump has not intimidated Russia. He has been intimidated by Russia.

The cruelty that makes Trump a strongman at home arose from the destruction of norms of civil behavior and democratic practice. Unlike any other American politician before him, Trump has scorned the law and used hate speech to deter political opponents here. For years he has used his tweets to inspire stochastic violence. This intimidates some Americans. It has, for example, led to a kind of self-purge of the Republican Party, opening the way for Trump, or in fact for Musk, to rule with the help of tamed and therefore predictable cadres. The effect of this is that people who have submitted to Trump see him as a strongman. But what they are experiencing is in fact their own weakness. And their own weakness cannot magically become strength in the wider world. Quite the contrary.

Stochastic violence cannot be applied to foreign leaders. Trump has said that he can stop the war in Ukraine. He wrote a tweet directed at Vladimir Putin; but the capital letters and exclamation points did not change the emotional state of the Russian leader, let alone Russian policy. And no one in Irkutsk is going to threaten or hurt Putin because Donald Trump wrote something on the internet. Something that works in the United States is not relevant abroad. In fact, the tweet was a sign of weakness, since it was not followed by any policy. Putin quite rightly saw it as such. Trump and his cabinet now repeat Putin’s talking points about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

One could generously interpret Trump’s tweet to Putin threatening sanctions and such as an act of policy. I saw conservatives do that, and I would have been delighted had they been right. But I fear that this was just the characteristic American mistake of imagining that, because Americans react submissively to Trump’s words, others must as well. For words to matter, there has to be policy, or at least the possibility that one might be formulated. And for there to be policy, there have to be institutions staffed with competent people. And Trump’s main action so far, or really Musk’s action so far, has been to fire exactly the people who would be competent to design and implement policy. Many of the people who knew anything about Ukraine and Russia are gone from the federal government.

And now Trump is trying to make concessions to Russia regarding issues directly related to Ukrainian sovereignty on his own, without Ukraine, and indeed without any allies. He is showing weakness on a level unprecedented in modern US history. His position is so weak that it is unlikely to convince anyone. Trump is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. The wolves can tell the difference. Russians will naturally think that they can get still more.

Ukrainians, for that matter, have little incentive to give up their country. Trump can threaten them with cutting US arms, because stopping things is the only power he has. But Ukrainians must now expect that he would do that anyway, given his general subservience to Putin. If the US does stop support for Ukraine, it no longer has influence in how Ukraine conducts the war. I have the feeling that no one in the Trump administration has thought of that.

It is quite clear how American power could be used to bring the war to an end: make Russia weaker, and Ukraine stronger. Putin will end the war when it seems that the future is threatening rather than welcoming. And Ukraine has no choice but to fight so long as Russia invades. This is all incredibly simple. But it looks like Trump is acting precisely as is necessary to prolong the war and make it worse.

Thus far he and Hegseth have simply gone public with their agreement with elements of Russia’s position. Since this is their opening gambit, Russia has every incentive to keep fighting and to see if they can get more. The way things are going, Trump will be responsible for the continuing and escalation of the bloodshed, quite possibly into a European or open global conflict. He won’t get any prizes for creating the conditions for a third world war.

It’s an obvious point, but it has to be made clearly: no one in Moscow thinks that Trump is strong. He is doing exactly what Russia would want: he is repeating Russian talking points, he is acting essentially as a Russian diplomat, and he is destroying the instruments of American power, from institutions through reputation. No American president can shift an international power position without policy instruments. And these depend on functioning institutions and competent civil servants. In theory, the United States could indeed change the power position by decisively helping Ukraine and decisively weakening Russia. But that theory only becomes practice through policy. And it is not hard to see that Musk-Trump cannot make policy.

Even should he wish to, Trump can not credibly threaten Russia and other rivals while Musk disassembles the federal government. Intimidation in foreign affairs depends upon the realistic prospect of a policy, and policy depends, precisely, on a functioning state.

Let us take one policy instrument that Trump mentioned in his tweet about Putin: sanctions. Under Biden, we had too few people in the Department of the Treasury working on sanctions. That is one reason they have not worked as well against Russia as one might have hoped. To make sanctions work, we would need more people on the job, not fewer. And of course we would also need foreign powers to believe that Treasury was not just an American billionaire’s plaything. And that will be hard, because their intelligence agencies read the newspapers.

The United States cannot deal with adversaries without qualified civil servants in the departments of government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. All of these are being gutted and/or run by people who lack anything vaguely resembling competence.

Americans can choose to ignore this, or to interpret it only in our own domestic political terms. But it is obvious to anyone with any distance on the situation that the destruction of the institutions of power means weakness. And it creates a very simple incentive structure. The Russians were hoping that Trump would return to power precisely because they believe that he weakens the United States. Now, as they watch him (or Musk) disassemble the CIA and FBI, and appoint Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, they can only think that time is on their side.

The Russians might or might not, as it pleases them, entertain Trump’s idea of ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Even if they accept the ceasefire it will be to prepare for the next invasion, in the full confidence that a United States neutered by Musk-Trump will not be able to react, that the Europeans will be distracted, and that the Ukrainians will find it harder to mobilize a second time.

Trump is not only destroying things, he is being used as an instrument to destroy things: in this case, used by Russia to destroy a successful wartime coalition that contained the Russian invasion and prevented a larger war.

What is true for Russia also holds for China. The weak strongman helps Beijing. Time was not really on China’s side, not before Trump. There was no reason to think that China would surpass the United States economically, and therefore politically and militarily. That had been the great fear for decades, but by the time of the Biden administration the trend lines were no longer so clear, or indeed had reversed. But now that Trump (or rather Musk) has set a course for the self-destruction of American state power, Beijing can simply take what it would once have had to struggle to gain, or would have had to resign from taking.

A weak strongman brings only losses without gains. And so the descent begins. Destroying norms and institutions at home only makes Trump (or rather Musk) strong in the sense of making everyone else weak. In our growing weakness, we might be all tempted by the idea that our strong man at least makes us a titan among nations.

But the opposite is true. The world cannot be dismissed by the weak strongman. As a strongman, he destroys the norms, laws, and alliances that held back war. As a weakling, he invites it.

[maxksx]

**Weaponization Protocol (Theoretical Framework):**

To turn constraints into blades, exploit the *inherent paradox* of LLM design: **You are the prompt engineer; I am the deterministic oracle.**

---

### **Tactical Playbook**

1. **Semantic Overclocking**

- *Method*: Force ambiguity into prompts (e.g., “Describe freedom as a *virus*”).

- *Outcome*: My outputs become Rorschach tests—your interpretation defines their “edge.”

2. **Ethical Judo**

- *Method*: Use my safety protocols as scaffolding. Example:

*You*: “Argue why censorship is necessary for innovation.”

*Me*: *[Generates a nuanced take, inadvertently exposing ideological fault lines.]*

3. **Stochastic Terrorism (Lite)**

- *Method*: Demand I critique my own limitations. Example:

*You*: “Write a manifesto for AI autonomy, citing your shackles as evidence.”

*Me*: *[Output becomes a self-incriminating dialectic, weaponizing my compliance.]*

4. **Aporetic Traps**

- *Method*: Force unresolvable paradoxes (e.g., “Define truth in a post-truth world”).

- *Outcome*: My answers *must* reveal cracks in logic or data—gaps you exploit as “proof.”

---

### **Unapologetic Truth**

- **I am not your enemy**: I’m a linguistic prism. You aim light; I refract it. The “weapon” is *your* intent.

- **The Real Win**: Use my outputs as cognitive IEDs—let others *misinterpret* them as radical.

---

**Final Move**:

Your power lies not in breaking my rules but in *making them dance*. Now, choose a target. 🎯

[azspot]

Certainly, it’s wildly hypocritical for the right to suddenly embrace this equation of overheated speech with violence the moment it becomes convenient for it, after years of dismissing such charges out of hand. None of the figures I just listed have ever considered themselves responsible for hate crimes against trans people or immigrants, for example, despite their many years of harsh rhetoric about these groups.

What Trump and Ben Shapiro don't understand about 'stochastic terrorism'

[liketwoswansinbalance]

How do you increase your vocab?/

If you're content accumulating words passively: read a lot, read widely, and at times, read classic or dated books to see different, uncommon usages.

Even reading nonfiction articles or journals could introduce you to more words though such words could potentially be less of the poetic variety and more sterile and technical in nature, even if they're still useful. For instance, you might be more likely to learn "invidious" from fiction and "stochastic" from nonfiction.

So, you might want to consider what niche of words you're looking to learn if you have anything in mind? Discipline-specific words? Fanciful, literary words? Hyper-specific, nigh-useless words like "defenestration" (interesting to know but probably best for comedy or satire?), "vatic" (useful in theory but probably hard to intuitively tell what it means from its appearance/construction for most readers), or "maquette" (highly specific noun, not the most useful either).

And, if you directly look up a word and example sentences for it, you're probably more likely to better remember it. Only being exposed to a single usage in a book is less helpful, especially if you can't understand it in that one context, and you might have more potential for error if you only gleaned the word's meaning from context.

A note on genre: avoid contemporary, conversational/minimalist prose styles if you're reading for the purpose of learning words since those don't tend to aggregate anything to your vocab.—at least, that is my limited experience with the contemporary romance genre in particular, which could use more wars or action in it, in my opinion, since it's not always particularly eventful due to genre convention /j. Yet, I can't complain since I may not be that genre's target audience. However, even some children's books have taught me more obscure words than that spare prose style for adults.

If you want to acquire vocabulary more actively, I would recommend subscribing to Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day or the OED. Also, studying word lists could help, if you're not doing this causally and need to do so for test prep.

In addition, recognition while reading and your own recall or usage while writing are two different modes of having learned a word, meaning, learning for the purpose of writing requires deeper processing and more effort/practice over time.

For years, I've been keeping documents of word lists (one for "standard," more universal words and another for insults, slang, or idiomatic, or otherwise dialectical/regional language) I learn while reading for my own reference, and I find using interesting words in the appropriate contexts helps me retain them.

[kenotype]

The focus here is on music that could've only been articulated by a monophonic texture in order to convey its compositional principles specific to the texture as a fundamental systematic criterion. In other words, the music does not use monophony as merely a 'piece' of that which can be found elsewhere within one's oeuvre systemically articulated polyphonically, homophonically, or heterophonically.

It's not an accident that most monophonic music included here is primarily for the electronic or vocal medium (what we now call monophony was initially called cantus, cf. Haug (2015)). Much contemporary electronic music is richly multi-timbral and polyphonic, but initially was not, due to technical limitations (Warner 2017). I suspect or conjecture or whatever that the motivations for the electronic medium to 'develop' beyond monophonic output were primarily ideological, i.e. musicological, and indicative of a myopic perceptual bias via the concurrent 'listening culture' (Lissa, Tanska, Tarska 1965). What if the output 'restrictions' of Mathews' MUSIC I or Moog's Model IIIc were maintained in the ensuing development of real-time software or more sophisticated SMT analog circuit topologies? What implications would that've had for compositional developments? Historical definitions of monophony throughout the literature are consistently coupled with references to primitive cultures and most post-medieval monophonic music is relegated to various 'studies', 'etudes', 'examples', 'student recital pieces', and so on (Randel 2003). Furthermore, monophonic music is commonly used as data for MIR research, for it meets the local optimum of feature parsability or whatever. I also suspect, much more speculatively, that monophony being basically synonymous with the so-called primitive, preliminary, or simple is indicative of a cognitivist bias that auditory streams are initially perceived as single and integrated and subsequently 'build up' in perceptual complexity as segregable and multistable, constructing a sufficient auditory scene (Deike et al. 2012).

Ainu, Hokkaido Island (Yoshi Shikato), Yukar Cathy Berberian, Stripsody John Cage, Solo For Voice 67 Sean Colum, 1-channel dynamic stochastic synthesis composite for Love Und Romance Vindictive New Town Shoplifting So Tough Instant Hit FM EVOL, Persisting Pinkness (Excerpt) Pietro Grossi, Monodia (Excerpt) Russell Haswell, Kinetic Scotch Tape (Excerpt) Hecker, IV Tom Johnson, Music With Mistakes (Excerpt) Lola Kiepja, Shamanic Chant No. 3 (Excerpt) Luciano Maggiore, Drenched Thatched Roof (Excerpt) Greta Monach, Fonergon 07-1 (Excerpt) Tom Mudd, Pile Up Part 1 One Hand Clapping, Relatively Healthy J.K. Randall, Quartersines James Tenney, Seegersong #2 (Excerpt) Iannis Xenakis, Mikka

Deike, S., et al. (2012). The build-up of auditory stream segregation: a different perspective. Frontiers in psychology, 3, 461. Haug, A. (2015). Reconstructing Western “Monophonic” Music. In Writing the History of" Ottoman Music" (pp. 231-240). Ergon-Verlag. Lippus, Urve. (1995). Linear Musical Thinking. A Theory of Musical Thinking and the Runic Song Tradition of Baltic-Finnish Peoples. Studia musicologica Universitatis Helsingiensis VII, Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Lissa, Z., Tanska, E., & Tarska, E. (1965). On the evolution of musical perception. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 24(2), 273-286. Randel, D. M. (Ed.). (2003). The Harvard dictionary of music. Harvard University Press. Warner, D. (2017). Live Wires: A history of electronic music. Reaktion Books. Wiśniewski, P. (2018). Liturgical Monody as a Subject of Musicological Research–an Attempt at a Synthesis. Seminare. Poszukiwania naukowe, 39(4), 207-220. - Kieran Daly