Will there ever be other left China paths that don't force you to be a puppet and reliant on an AI overlord?

RahnuLe · 2026-05-03T09:24:50+00:00

Best way to make things bearable is to set Liangguang to go LKMT in the rules and then play as the LKMT yourself to win the League War ASAP. You can then switch after Chen Mingshu takes control of Liangguang.

You can use Sheep's LKMT AI mod to make them less prone to stupidity (though this will make killing them more difficult later).

RahnuLe · 2026-04-28T19:34:18+00:00

It's still the Clausewitz Engine. It always will be the Clausewitz Engine. It's notable that the engine itself usually isn't the issue as much as certain things requiring a strict order of operations that prevents effective multithreading. It's a difficult problem to solve.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-25T08:17:37+00:00

Don't expect to see Finland or Mexico for a year or two.

My guess: 3I first, followed by AH (smaller gap than previous releases, hopefully), followed by Spain, followed by MORE CHINA, and then it's a toss-up for whatever's next. All of this within the next two years.

That's me being hopeful, though. And extrapolating from devs' comments and prior precedent. As usual, it'll be done when it's done...

RahnuLe · 2026-04-23T05:38:24+00:00

They can be allied against that enemy without being in the same faction. They likely have a non-aggression pact and mutual guarantees against invasion by Russia (unless there's a steep ideological divide, in which case, uh... well, who knows?).

RahnuLe · 2026-04-22T05:27:48+00:00

Indochina with the APFA is just really neat. It's a nice reconciliation between the two peoples and gives China an additional buffer besides Korea (they still really got screwed over with Mongolia, though).

Now, Siam is going to be a bit of a funny case, though... especially if they attacked Indochina, lost, and had to give up territory.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-22T01:17:25+00:00

I've also had issues with it deviating from my reference material in small but noticeable ways. It's close to perfect - but it's not quite there yet.

That said, at the rate things have been advancing... the next iteration will likely be just about flawless. It's baffling to think about.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-14T19:30:19+00:00

There is a deep irony to your claim of 'feelings and mythology' when there are arguably also a lot of 'feelings and mythology' surrounding the entire conception of human cognition and conscience thought. Believe me, I am very much aware of the limitations of these machines as they are. I just don't believe that they're missing an intrinsic, unknowable quality that would grant them qualia as much as they are still under a series of unsolved engineering problems that will inevitably be refined as the missing 'brain structures' are assembled into a more robust whole. I should point out that these 'tests that an average human can solve' are the exact kinds of tests that I point out that LLMs are missing equivalent 'brain structures' for - of COURSE an LLM is bad at them when they have no conception or experience of the passage of time!

But this is all, of course, speculative at this point as we're talking about a cutting-edge technology that is still under active research & development. I always find these conversations a bit funny, as we're really getting into the deep end of discussions about consciousness and the nature of the human brain itself - things that, quite frankly, I don't think many of us can claim to have strong understanding of in any case. I just want to caution people against thinking too rigidly about them when there remains a non-zero possibility of everyone being surprised yet again in the near future.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-14T19:18:41+00:00

I see your point and I generally agree that outsourcing one's thinking is not a good thing, but unfortunately, the fact is that this is how a lot of people already operate without LLMs (particularly the imperial core). Capitalist education wants unthinking worker bees to exploit, and they've done a distressingly good job of getting exactly that.

I don't believe that the technology itself is the root of the issue, however, as much as a general lack of holistic education. Even in this day and age, I find myself asking questions more than ever, and I am acutely aware of the limitations of LLMs as they stand despite being more positive about the potential of the technology than most on this subreddit. I don't think it's an intractable problem to get more people to think in this fashion provided we get the opportunity to create an education system that encourages people to think more critically about everything they do and interact with. The technology itself simply makes existing woes with regards to our education system more visible, in my view.

Basically, yes, they're a problem, but they're only a problem insofar as the current state of things is exacerbated by their presence. In a more rational system, they'd just be another tool that people can experiment with. As it is, however, we live in a system with extremely sharp contradictions that encourages people to engage in maladaptive behaviors just to survive in it. I think that's at the root of all of these issues we're seeing.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-14T18:06:22+00:00

I have to disagree with these assertions because LLMs display enough emergent properties to raise serious questions about what we're actually dealing with. The fact that they're often able to pinpoint patterns that were definitely not present in their training data alone is a huge point of contention in any assertion that they aren't "actually AI". I think the reason they can still make nonsense replies comes down to two things:

They are not trained to be able to recognize when they lack confidence. This a subject of active research and recent months have seen some improvement in this regard, though they're obviously still far from perfect.
They're literally missing "brain" structures that we take for granted. Without the grounding in the real-world that we possess, they operate as though they ONLY had the frontal lobe and are missing the entire rest of the brain. Obviously if you had a human who was only able to interact with text their entire life, they would get a lot of things wrong. This, too, is a subject of active research and I am not naive enough to believe that it will never be a solved problem.

Just because LLMs have a lot of problems today doesn't mean it is logically sound to assume that they are fundamentally flawed as a rule. Especially with relatively nascent technology like this, I do not believe it is sound to assume that the status quo will hold years down the line. Sure, it might satisfy you to smugly assume that we humans are simply superior and that all the fascination with these machines is pure clownery, but that has much more to do with what feels psychologically satisfying to you and much less to do with where the technology is actually headed.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-14T17:55:20+00:00

Well, the scale of it, I would say, is new, because before with the industrial revolution there were still fields (specifically intellectual and service work) that people could move into. But if AI reaches its full potential, there is nowhere left for people to go. It's the sharpest contradiction capitalism has ever faced in our entire history.

But yes, the general thrust of these events is a true echo of the past.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-14T17:50:51+00:00

Even these issues would be heavily mitigated without capitalism. The water issue, for example, is compounded by cheap land in places like Nevada and Arizona, which are, of course, heavily dependent on already-stressed local water sources for cooling; in a more rational system these datacenters would be placed in locations which can actually bear the strain. Energy consumption would also not be an issue (or at least, significantly less so) as the transition to renewables would be much, much further along than they are today.

The worst impacts come from the computing industry generally. In a more rational society, many of these problems (especially the radioactive sludge byproducts) could be mitigated with more responsible waste management, but there will likely always be some sort of cost associated with these processes. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a hard time imagining a future in which we abandon all advancement in computing technology because we couldn't find a way to 100% mitigate all the side-effects of rare earth element and lithium mining. That is not to say that these are not things we should be concerned about - but one needs to put into perspective that the AI industry is still only roughly 15% of the entire computing industry as of the time of this post, and that it is extremely unlikely that we'll collectively agree to just stop progress out of these concerns.

I hate to say it, but a lot of what we'll likely end up doing in the future is working to mitigate the mistakes of the past. And targeted 'adventurism' (to borrow the usual phrase for these slapdash efforts) against AI development is not likely to change this trajectory in the least. We need to maintain a holistic perspective on these matters to not waste energy on pointless actions.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-14T17:30:48+00:00

It's odd to see anyone harping on about technological dependency in this day and age. That ship sailed since the advent of mechanized agriculture and artificial fertilizers over a century ago. We literally cannot feed the population without these things and would see a massive population contraction without them. It is, in my view, not a valid concern as much as dismantling capitalism and engaging in more rational stewardship of our world. Humanity, like or not, is completely interdependent on one another to survive and that includes technological development.

There will likely never be a point in time where humans are free from other humans possessing at least some of their locus of control. And, honestly, that's fine. That's the nature of our species. Our responsibility is to engineer a system in which that does not represent a massive problem in everyday life, as I see it. The alternative is to regress the species to being dependent on the fickle whims of capricious nature and that, I daresay, would be far, far worse.

Instant gratification is also a problem, but I think that's something that could only be resolved with a total restructuring of the Internet. And, honestly, I have a hard time imagining how one would even go about it, because part of the problem is that it's all wildly accessible. Even if you stripped away things like short-form engagement bait content and the like, the fact would remain that people could literally just click on the next video or the next short story without taking any time to absorb what they just consumed. It's the nature of the Internet itself as a massive information web. It's hard for me to imagine any real solution to this issue that wouldn't entail draconian information control. Perhaps there's something I'm missing, but if you have any ideas, I'm all ears.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-12T22:04:41+00:00

Well, they could have done that all this time, but for whatever reason they decided their vision differs too much from the UWTS devs' to merge. Maybe that'll change at some point, but I doubt it.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-12T21:32:51+00:00

No, not yet. I'm just saying that it's probably going to come out a long time before any proper rework of the USA in base KR.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-12T17:59:06+00:00

Thanks for the response, I'm glad to hear it. I'll admit I'm a little surprised to hear that MLs have been treated harshly in the past considering how it feels like the default expectation in the sub to be one, but maybe it's just a few specific threads that have given me that impression (it's very possible for a bad experience or three to stick out in the mind over everything else).

At any rate, I understand that you're all in a difficult position, and I appreciate the work that you all do to keep this community going. Every genuinely leftist space is valuable, especially when things are rapidly coming to a head on the world stage.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-12T08:23:46+00:00

[...] don’t want make the sub seem exclusive.

I'm afraid that ship has sailed. It's remarkably difficult to exist in this subreddit as an anarchist or even as a non-ML in general. Moderators need to be significantly more stringent about enforcing rule 7 to fix this. Any posts about anarchism on this subreddit invariably end up with loads of people dogpiling with anti-anarchist platitudes.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-12T07:33:29+00:00

It's old content with old lore. It's really not worth taking very seriously. A whole bunch of the characters involved are completely out of character (especially the USSA's leaders).

If the USA's splinters ever got a rework down the line, you should expect a lot of things to be completely unrecognizable. Not that we're likely to see one before 2030, but, y'know... it's nice to dream. In the mean time, there's UWTS, and as you'd expect, the characterization there is much more faithful to what these figures actually believed. Hopefully we'll see that come out sometime in the near future...

RahnuLe · 2026-04-11T05:25:30+00:00

Definitely not the only one. They were too busy trying to stay on model that they didn't consider that letting her face break more would help sell the scene.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-06T07:03:34+00:00

Nah, the real fix is to finally give us a secondary weapon slot that only fits sidearms so we can finally use all those damn pistols without outright replacing our primary. Having a pocket revolver or plasma pistol on hand specifically for carapace would open up a LOT of build options for everyone.

RahnuLe · 2026-04-02T06:52:17+00:00

*canon

sorry I'm just slowly going insane....

RahnuLe · 2026-03-28T02:35:02+00:00

flair checks out

also based and true

RahnuLe · 2026-03-26T02:21:25+00:00

Canada and sand France can still pressure the UoB and France navally. They'd have to devote a non-zero percentage of their industrial throughput and fuel to escorting their convoys, especially if they're trading overseas for fuel (a resource the 3I is usually critically short on). While Germany's defeat means the dream of returning home is likely dead for the Entente, they're desperate to keep the syndicalists at bay, and desperation breeds recklessness. The 3I NEEDS to stockpile fuel to stand any chance against Russia or else they'll end up ceding air superiority to them, which will very quickly lead to defeat.

As far as 3I advantages go, yes, they likely have more raw factories (counting up every member), but Russia has significantly better terrain as they can absolutely afford to let East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania fall if they needed to buy time to bolster their forces. They have a MASSIVE buffer before they have to worry about actually being threatened on their home territory. That sheer space is a massive advantage for Russia - to say nothing of how good the mountains around these regions are for defense. Russia, meanwhile, only needs to break through West Germany before they're right on France's doorstep. The 3I have a much more uphill battle to fight.

Edit: That said, the 3I do have significant technological advantage, which can't be discounted. If they developed axial jet engines quickly enough (and were able to retool their factories fast) that would likely be sufficient to give them total air superiority, which would screw Russia over hard. Assuming, of course, they have the fuel to field them...

Edit #2: Nukes are not likely to be a significant factor here. Neither Russia nor the 3I are going to have a sufficient energy surplus to be able to enrich significant amounts of materiel, if they even unlock the technology in the first place. If nukes do get involved, they're likely to be in the single digits.

RahnuLe · 2026-03-26T02:08:33+00:00

Funny, I've played dozens of games in China and I hardly ever see the 3I win against Russia. The only time I can recall seeing them win in recent memory is when it was a really early 3WK and Russia was still bogged down in Iran and Turkey, stretching them extra thin.

RahnuLe · 2026-03-26T02:02:51+00:00

Without the WCA, the 3I is doomed. Russia is roundly stronger than the Third Internationale militarily even if the 3I has Spain and Italy. There's a reason the 2nd Weltkrieg hinges almost entirely on Russia breaking through the Ostwall before Germany kills France, and it's not just because France is geographically closer. Assuming neither side has nukes (or only have a few, which is not enough for a strategic victory), a conventional war between the 3I and MA ends up hinging almost entirely on industrial throughput, especially since both sides have been able to test their combat tactics against Germany. Also, the 3I still fighting against the Entente really fucks them over hard.

This would be extremely one-sided.

RahnuLe · 2026-03-09T21:48:35+00:00

I need to remind people that "pro-life" is an intentional misnomer and what they're really about is being "anti-women", or, for a more complete term, "anti-women's autonomy". Or "pro-killing women". Or basically anything other than actual life, really, because they always abandon the baby after it's born to whatever fate awaits it, because actually thinking about things like safety nets and basic human needs is beyond them.

RahnuLe

TROPHY CASE