Palm Springs’ first affordable housing community in 14 years is now open. City and county leaders gathered Thursday at the Monarch Apartments for an opening ceremony. News Channel 3&#x27;s Bianca Ventura spoke with some residents who are now occupying the apartments.

Palm Springs opens the Monarch Apartments, the city's new affordable housing community - KESQ

This is the official term for the widow of a king and essentially means that Camilla would still enjoy the fancy vibes and importance of her former title without actually being Queen Consort anymore, due to another monarch and their spouse – in this case, Prince William and Kate Middleton ...

This is what'll happen to Camilla's title should King Charles pass away

On Wednesday afternoon, King Charles had his first in-person audience with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak since the monarch revealed that he had been diagnosed with cancer. Despite the diagnosis, which was detected when he was being treated for a benign enlarged prostate, the sovereign has ...

Queen Camilla Steps Out with Lesser-Known Working Royal amid King Charles' Cancer Diagnosis

The monarch met with Rishi Sunak on Wednesday for the first private audience with the King since it was revealed he had been diagnosed with cancer earlier this month. The 75-year-old is undergoing treatment for the illness which was discovered while he underwent surgery on an enlarged prostate.

King Charles LIVE: His Majesty 'still in charge' as he carries on with royal duties - Mirror Online

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A Short History of the World, by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE Britain had hardly lost the Thirteen Colonies in America before a profound social and political convulsion at the very heart of Grand Monarchy was to remind Europe still more vividly of the essentially temporary nature of the political arrangements of the world. We have said that the French monarchy was the most successful of the personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy and model of a multitude of competing and minor courts. But it flourished on a basis of injustice that led to its dramatic collapse. It was brilliant and aggressive, but it was wasteful of the life and substance of its common people. The clergy and nobility were protected from taxation by a system of exemption that threw the whole burden of the state upon the middle and lower classes. The peasants were ground down by taxation; the middle classes were dominated and humiliated by the nobility. In 1787 this French monarchy found itself bankrupt and obliged to call representatives of the different classes of the realm into consultation upon the perplexities of defective income and excessive expenditure. In 1789 the States General, a gathering of the nobles, clergy and commons, roughly equivalent to the earlier form of the British Parliament, was called together at Versailles. It had not assembled since 1610. For all that time France had been an absolute monarchy. Now the people found a means of expressing their long fermenting discontent. Disputes immediately broke out between the three estates, due to the resolve of the Third Estate, the Commons, to control the Assembly. The Commons got the better of these disputes and the States General became a National Assembly, clearly resolved to keep the crown in order, as the British Parliament kept the British crown in order. The king (Louis XVI) prepared for a struggle and brought up troops from the provinces. Whereupon Paris and France revolted. The collapse of the absolute monarchy was very swift. The grim-looking prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of Paris, and the insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. In the east and north-west provinces many chateaux belonging to the nobility were burnt by the peasants, their title-deeds carefully destroyed, and the owners murdered or driven away. In a month the ancient and decayed system of the aristocratic order had collapsed. Many of the leading princes and courtiers of the queen’s party fled abroad. A provisional city government was set up in Paris and in most of the other large cities, and a new armed force, the National Guard, a force designed primarily and plainly to resist the forces of the crown, was brought into existence by these municipal bodies. The National Assembly found itself called upon to create a new political and social system for a new age. It was a task that tried the powers of that gathering to the utmost. It made a great sweep of the chief injustices of the absolutist regime; it abolished tax exemptions, serfdom, aristocratic titles and privileges and sought to establish a constitutional monarchy in Paris. The king abandoned Versailles and its splendours and kept a diminished state in the palace of the Tuileries in Paris. For two years it seemed that the National Assembly might struggle through to an effective modernized government. Much of its work was sound and still endures, if much was experimental and had to be undone. Much was ineffective. There was a clearing up of the penal code; torture, arbitrary imprisonment and persecutions for heresy were abolished. The ancient provinces of France, Normandy, Burgundy and the like gave place to eighty departments. Promotion to the highest ranks in the army was laid open to men of every class. An excellent and simple system of law courts was set up, but its value was much vitiated by having the judges appointed by popular election for short periods of time. This made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the judges, like the members of the Assembly, were forced to play to the gallery. And the whole vast property of the church was seized and administered by the state; religious establishments not engaged in education or works of charity were broken up, and the salaries of the clergy made a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad thing for the lower clergy in France, who were often scandalously underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in addition the choice of priests and bishops was made elective, which struck at the very root idea of the Roman Church, which centred everything upon the Pope, and in which all authority is from above downward. Practically the National Assembly wanted at one blow to make the church in France Protestant, in organization if not in doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and conflicts between the state priests created by the National Assembly and the recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who were loyal to Rome. In 1791 the experiment of Constitutional monarchy in France was brought to an abrupt end by the action of the king and queen, working in concert with their aristocratic and monarchist friends abroad. Foreign armies gathered on the Eastern frontier and one night in June the king and queen and their children slipped away from the Tuileries and fled to join the foreigners and the aristocratic exiles. They were caught at Varennes and brought back to Paris, and an France flamed up into a passion of patriotic republicanism. A Republic was proclaimed, open war with Austria and Prussia ensued, and the king was tried and executed (January, 1793) on the model already set by England, for treason to his people. And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French people. There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and the Republic. There was to be an end to compromise at home and abroad; at home royalists and every form of disloyalty were to be stamped out; abroad France was to be the protector and helper of all revolutionaries. All Europe, all the world, was to become Republican. The youth of France poured into the Republican armies; a new and wonderful song spread through the land, a song that still warms the blood like wine, the Marseillaise. Before that chant and the leaping columns of French bayonets and their enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies rolled back; before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far beyond the utmost achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they had raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland. Then the French Government did an unwise thing. It had been exasperated by the expulsion of its representative from England upon the execution of Louis, and it declared war against England. It was an unwise thing to do, because the revolution which had given France a new enthusiastic infantry and a brilliant artillery released from its aristocratic officers and many cramping conditions had destroyed the discipline of the navy, and the English were supreme upon the sea. And this provocation united all England against France, whereas there had been at first a very considerable liberal movement in Great Britain in sympathy with the revolution. THE TRIAL OF LOUIS XVI (From a print in the British Museum) Of the fight that France made in the next few years against a European coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove the Austrians for ever out of Belgium, and made Holland a republic. The Dutch fleet, frozen in the Texel, surrendered to a handful of cavalry without firing its guns. For some time the French thrust towards Italy was hung up, and it was only in 1796 that a new general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the ragged and hungry republican armies in triumph across Piedmont to Mantua and Verona. Says C. F. Atkinson, [ ] “What astonished the Allies most of all was the number and the velocity of the Republicans. These improvised armies had in fact nothing to delay them. Tents were unprocurable for want of money, untransportable for want of the enormous number of wagons that would have been required, and also unnecessary, for the discomfort that would have caused wholesale desertion in professional armies was cheerfully borne by the men of 1793- 94. Supplies for armies of then unheard-of size could not be carried in convoys, and the French soon became familiar with ‘living on the country.’ Thus 1793 saw the birth of the modern system of war—rapidity of movement, full development of national strength, bivouacs, requisitions and force as against cautious manœuvring, small professional armies, tents and full rations, and chicane. The first represented the decision-compelling spirit, the second the spirit of risking little to gain a little ... .” 1 And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the Marseillaise and fighting for la France, manifestly never quite clear in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the countries into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending itself in a far less glorious fashion. The revolution was now under the sway of a fanatical leader, Robespierre. This man is difficult to judge; he was a man of poor physique, naturally timid, and a prig. But he had that most necessary gift for power, faith. He set himself to save the Republic as he conceived it, and he imagined it could be saved by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to save the Republic. The living spirit of the Republic, it seemed, had sprung from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king. There were insurrections; one in the west, in the district of La Vendée, where the people rose against the conscription and against the dispossession of the orthodox clergy, and were led by noblemen and priests; one in the south, where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the royalists of Toulon had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing royalists. The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering began. The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood. The queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre’s antagonists were guillotined, atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were guillotined; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre lived, it seemed, on blood; and needed more and more, as an opium-taker needs more and more opium. THE EXECUTION OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, QUEEN OF FRANCE, OCTOBER 16, 1793 (From a print in the British Museum) Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was overthrown and guillotined. He was succeeded by a Directory of five men which carried on the war of defence abroad and held France together at home for five years. Their reign formed a curious interlude in this history of violent changes. They took things as they found them. The propagandist zeal of the revolution carried the French armies into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, south Germany and north Italy. Everywhere kings were expelled and republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated the Directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures of the liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment of the French Government. Their wars became less and less the holy wars of freedom, and more and more like the aggressive wars of the ancient regime. The last feature of Grand Monarchy that France was disposed to discard was her tradition of foreign policy. One discovers it still as vigorous under the Directorate as if there had been no revolution. Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who embodied in its intensest form this national egotism of the French. He gave that country ten years of glory and the humiliation of a final defeat. This was that same Napoleon Bonaparte who had led the armies of the Directory to victory in Italy. Throughout the five years of the Directorate he had been scheming and working for self-advancement. Gradually he clambered to supreme power. He was a man of severely limited understanding but of ruthless directness and great energy. He had begun life as an extremist of the school of Robespierre; he owed his first promotion to that side; but he had no real grasp of the new forces that were working in Europe. His utmost political imagination carried him to a belated and tawdry attempt to restore the Western Empire. He tried to destroy the remains of the old Holy Roman Empire, intending to replace it by a new one centring upon Paris. The Emperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy Roman Emperor and became simply Emperor of Austria. Napoleon divorced his French wife in order to marry an Austrian princess. He became practically monarch of France as First Consul in 1799, and he made himself Emperor of France in 1804 in direct imitation of Charlemagne. He was crowned by the Pope in Paris, taking the crown from the Pope and putting it upon his own head himself as Charlemagne had directed. His son was crowned King of Rome. For some years Napoleon’s reign was a career of victory. He conquered most of Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia and Austria, and dominated all Europe west of Russia. But he never won the command of the sea from the British and his fleets sustained a conclusive defeat inflicted by the British Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar (1805). Spain rose against him in 1808 and a British army under Wellington thrust the French armies slowly northward out of the peninsula. In 1811 Napoleon came into conflict with the Tsar Alexander I, and in 1812 he invaded Russia with a great conglomerate army of 600,000 men, that was defeated and largely destroyed by the Russians and the Russian winter. Germany rose against him, Sweden turned against him. The French armies were beaten back and at Fontainebleau Napoleon abdicated (1814). He was exiled to Elba, returned to France for one last effort in 1815 and was defeated by the allied British, Belgians and Prussians at Waterloo. He died a British prisoner at St. Helena in 1821. The forces released by the French revolution were wasted and finished. A great Congress of the victorious allies met at Vienna to restore as far as possible the state of affairs that the great storm had rent to pieces. For nearly forty years a sort of peace, a peace of exhausted effort, was maintained in Europe. [ ] In his article, “French Revolutionary Wars,” in the Encyclopædia Britannica 1 About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2011). A Short History of the World. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11870/11870-h/11870-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE

THE AGE OF POLITICAL EXPERIMENTS; OF GRAND MONARCHY AND PARLIAMENTS AND REPUBLICANISM IN EUROPE

In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY VII. — THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY From the very outset of this war it was manifest to the clear-headed observer that only the complete victory of German imperialism could save the dynastic system in Europe from the fate that it had challenged. That curious system had been the natural and unplanned development of the political complications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two systems of monarchies, the Bourbon system and the German, then ruled Europe between them. With the latter was associated the tradition of the European unity under the Roman empire; all the Germanic monarchs had an itch to be called Caesar. The Kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Czar had, so to speak, the prior claim to the title. The Prussian king set up as a Caesar in 1871; Queen Victoria became the Caesar of India (Kaisir-i-Hind) under the auspices of Lord Beaconsfield, and last and least, that most detestable of all Coburgers, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, gave Kaiserism a touch of quaint absurdity by setting up as Czar of Bulgaria. The weakening of the Bourbon system by the French revolution and the Napoleonic adventure cleared the way for the complete ascendancy of the Germanic monarchies in spite of the breaking away of the United States from that system. After 1871, a constellation of quasi-divine Teutonic monarchs, of which the German Emperor, the German Queen Victoria, the German Czar, were the greatest stars, formed a caste apart, intermarried only among themselves, dominated the world and was regarded with a mystical awe by the ignorant and foolish in most European countries. The marriages, the funerals, the coronations, the obstetrics of this amazing breed of idols were matters of almost universal worship. The Czar and Queen Victoria professed also to be the heads of religion upon earth. The court-centered diplomacies of the more firmly rooted monarchies steered all the great liberating movements of the nineteenth century into monarchical channels. Italy was made a monarchy; Greece, the motherland of republics, was handed over to a needy scion of the Danish royal family; the sturdy peasants of Bulgaria suffered from a kindred imposition. Even Norway was saddled with as much of a king as it would stand, as a condition of its independence. At the dawn of the twentieth century republican freedom seemed a remote dream beyond the confines of Switzerland and France—and it had no very secure air in France. Reactionary scheming has been an intermittent fever in the French republic for six and forty years. The French foreign office is still undemocratic in tradition and temper. But for the restless disloyalty of the Hohenzollerns this German kingly caste might be dominating the world to this day. Of course the stability of this Teutonic dynastic system in Europe—which will presently seem to the student of history so curious a halting-place upon the way to human unity—rested very largely upon the maintenance of peace. It was the failure to understand this on the part of the German and Bulgarian rulers in particular that has now brought all monarchy to the question. The implicit theory that supported the intermarrying German royal families in Europe was that their inter-relationship and their aloofness from their subjects was a mitigation of national and racial animosities. In the days when Queen Victoria was the grandmother of Europe this was a plausible argument. King, Czar and Emperor, or Emperor and Emperor would meet, and it was understood that these meetings were the lubrication of European affairs. The monarchs married largely, conspicuously, and very expensively for our good. Royal funerals, marriages, christenings, coronations, and jubilees interrupted traffic and stimulated trade everywhere. They seemed to give a raison d'jtre for mankind. It is the Emperor William and the Czar Ferdinand who have betrayed not only humanity but their own strange caste by shattering all these pleasant illusions. The wisdom of Kant is justified, and we know now that kings cause wars. It needed the shock of the great war to bring home the wisdom of that old Scotchman of Kvnigsberg to the mind of the ordinary man. Moreover in support of the dynastic system was the fact that it did exist as the system in possession, and all prosperous and intelligent people are chary of disturbing existing things. Life is full of vestigial structures, and it is a long way to logical perfection. Let us keep on, they would argue, with what we have. And another idea which, rightly or wrongly, made men patient with the emperors and kings was an exaggerated idea of the insecurity of republican institutions. You can still hear very old dull men say gravely that “kings are better than pronunciamentos”; there was an article upon Greece to this effect quite recently in that uncertain paper The New Statesman. Then a kind of illustrative gesture would be made to the South American republics, although the internal disturbances of the South American republics have diminished to very small dimensions in the last three decades and although pronunciamentos rarely disturb the traffic in Switzerland, the United States, or France. But there can be no doubt that the influence of the Germanic monarchy up to the death of Queen Victoria upon British thought was in the direction of estrangement from the two great modern republics and in the direction of assistance and propitiation to Germany. We surrendered Heligoland, we made great concessions to German colonial ambitions, we allowed ourselves to be jockeyed into a phase of dangerous hostility to France. A practice of sneering at things American has died only very recently out of English journalism and literature, as any one who cares to consult the bound magazines of the ‘seventies and eighties may soon see for himself. It is well too in these days not to forget Colonel Marchand, if only to remember that such a clash must never recur. But in justice to our monarchy we must remember that after the death of Queen Victoria, the spirit, if not the forms, of British kingship was greatly modified by the exceptional character and ability of King Edward VII. He was curiously anti-German in spirit; he had essentially democratic instincts; in a few precious years he restored good will between France and Great Britain. It is no slight upon his successor to doubt whether any one could have handled the present opportunities and risks of monarchy in Great Britain as Edward could have handled them. Because no doubt if monarchy is to survive in the British Empire it must speedily undergo the profoundest modification. The old state of affairs cannot continue. The European dynastic system, based upon the intermarriage of a group of mainly German royal families, is dead to-day; it is freshly dead, but it is as dead as the rule of the Incas. It is idle to close our eyes to this fact. The revolution in Russia, the setting up of a republic in China, demonstrating the ripeness of the East for free institutions, the entry of the American republics into world politics—these things slam the door on any idea of working back to the old nineteenth-century system. People calls to people. “No peace with the Hohenzollerns” is a cry that carries with it the final repudiation of emperors and kings. The man in the street will assure you he wants no diplomatic peace. Beyond the unstable shapes of the present the political forms of the future rise now so clearly that they are the common talk of men. Kant’s lucid thought told us long ago that the peace of the world demanded a world union of republics. That is a commonplace remark now in every civilized community. The stars in their courses, the logic of circumstances, the everyday needs and everyday intelligence of men, all these things march irresistibly towards a permanent world peace based on democratic republicanism. The question of the future of monarchy is not whether it will be able to resist and overcome that trend; it has as little chance of doing that as the Lama of Thibet has of becoming Emperor of the Earth. It is whether it will resist openly, become the centre and symbol of a reactionary resistance, and have to be abolished and swept away altogether everywhere, as the Romanoffs have already been swept away in Russia, or whether it will be able in this country and that to adapt itself to the necessities of the great age that dawns upon mankind, to take a generous and helpful attitude towards its own modification, and so survive, for a time at any rate, in that larger air. It is the fashion for the apologists of monarchy in the British Empire to speak of the British system as a crowned republic. That is an attractive phrase to people of republican sentiments. It is quite conceivable that the British Empire may be able to make that phrase a reality and that the royal line may continue, a line of hereditary presidents, with some of the ancient trappings and something of the picturesque prestige that, as the oldest monarchy in Europe, it has to-day. Two kings in Europe have already gone far towards realizing this conception of a life president; both the King of Italy and the King of Norway live as simply as if they were in the White House and are far more accessible. Along that line the British monarchy must go if it is not to go altogether. Will it go along those lines? There are many reasons for hoping that it will do so. The Times has styled the crown the “golden link” of the empire. Australians and Canadians, it was argued, had little love for the motherland but the greatest devotion to the sovereign, and still truer was this of Indians, Egyptians, and the like. It might be easy to press this theory of devotion too far, but there can be little doubt that the British Crown does at present stand as a symbol of unity over diversity such as no other crown, unless it be that of Austria-Hungary, can be said to do. The British crown is not like other crowns; it may conceivably take a line of its own and emerge—possibly a little more like a hat and a little less like a crown—from trials that may destroy every other monarchial system in the world. Now many things are going on behind the scenes, many little indications peep out upon the speculative watcher and vanish again; but there is very little that is definite to go upon at the present time to determine how far the monarchy will rise to the needs of this great occasion. Certain acts and changes, the initiative to which would come most gracefully from royalty itself, could be done at this present time. They may be done quite soon. Upon the doing of them wait great masses of public opinion. The first of these things is for the British monarchy to sever itself definitely from the German dynastic system, with which it is so fatally entangled by marriage and descent, and to make its intention of becoming henceforth more and more British in blood as well as spirit, unmistakably plain. This idea has been put forth quite prominently in the Times. The king has been asked to give his countenance to the sweeping away of all those restrictions first set up by George the Third, upon the marriage of the Royal Princes with British, French and American subjects. The British Empire is very near the limit of its endurance of a kingly caste of Germans. The choice of British royalty between its peoples and its cousins cannot be indefinitely delayed. Were it made now publicly and boldly, there can be no doubt that the decision would mean a renascence of monarchy, a considerable outbreak of royalist enthusiasm in the Empire. There are times when a king or queen must need be dramatic and must a little anticipate occasions. It is not seemly to make concessions perforce; kings may not make obviously unwilling surrenders; it is the indecisive kings who lose their crowns. No doubt the Anglicization of the royal family by national marriages would gradually merge that family into the general body of the British peerage. Its consequent loss of distinction might be accompanied by an associated fading out of function, until the King became at last hardly more functional than was the late Duke of Norfolk as premier peer. Possibly that is the most desirable course from many points of view. It must be admitted that the abandonment of marriages within the royal caste and a bold attempt to introduce a strain of British blood in the royal family does not in itself fulfil all that is needed if the British king is indeed to become the crowned president of his people and the nominal and accepted leader of the movement towards republican institutions. A thing that is productive of an enormous amount of republican talk in Great Britain is the suspicion—I believe an ill-founded suspicion—that there are influences at work at court antagonistic to republican institutions in friendly states and that there is a disposition even to sacrifice the interests of the liberal allies to dynastic sympathies. These things are not to be believed, but it would be a feat of vast impressiveness if there were something like a royal and public repudiation of the weaknesses of cousinship. The behaviour of the Allies towards that great Balkan statesman Venizelos, the sacrificing of the friendly Greek republicans in favour of the manifestly treacherous King of Greece, has produced the deepest shame and disgust in many quarters that are altogether friendly, that are even warmly “loyal” to the British monarchy. And in a phase of tottering thrones it is very undesirable that the British habit of asylum should be abused. We have already in England the dethroned monarch of a friendly republic; he is no doubt duly looked after. In the future there may be a shaking of the autumnal boughs and a shower of emperors and kings. We do not want Great Britain to become a hotbed of reactionary plotting and the starting-point of restoration raids into the territories of emancipated peoples. This is particularly desirable if presently, after the Kaiser’s death—which by all the statistics of Hohenzollern mortality cannot be delayed now for many years—the present Crown Prince goes a-wandering. We do not want any German ex-monarchs; Sweden is always open to them and friendly, and to Sweden they ought to go; and particularly do British people dread an irruption of Hohenzollerns or Coburgers. Almost as undesirable would be the arrival of the Czar and Czarina. It is supremely important that no wind of suspicion should blow between us and the freedom of Russia. After the war even more than during the war will the enemy be anxious to sow discord between the great Russian-speaking and English-speaking democracies. Quite apart from the scandal of their inelegant domesticities, the establishment of the Czar and Czarina in England with frequent and easy access to our royal family may be extraordinarily unfortunate for the British monarchy. I will confess a certain sympathy for the Czar myself. He is not an evil figure, he is not a strong figure, but he has that sort of weakness, that failure in decision, which trails revolution in its wake. He has ended one dynasty already. The British royal family owes it to itself, that he bring not the infection of his misfortunes to Windsor. The security of the British monarchy lies in such a courageous severance of its destinies from the Teutonic dynastic system. Will it make that severance? There I share an almost universal ignorance. The loyalty of the British is not to what kings are too prone to call “my person,” not to a chosen and admired family, but to a renascent mankind. We have fought in this war for Belgium, for France, for general freedom, for civilization and the whole future of mankind, far more than for ourselves. We have not fought for a king. We are discovering in that spirit of human unity that lies below the idea of a League of Free Nations the real invisible king of our heart and race. But we will very gladly go on with our task under a nominal king unless he hampers us in the task that grows ever more plainly before us. ... That, I think, is a fair statement of British public opinion on this question. But every day when I am in London I walk past Buckingham Palace to lunch at my club, and I look at that not very expressive fagade and wonder—and we all wonder—what thoughts are going on behind it and what acts are being conceived there. Out of it there might yet come some gesture of acceptance magnificent enough to set beside President Wilson’s magnificent declaration of war. ... These are things in the scales of fate. I will not pretend to be able to guess even which way the scales will swing. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (1918). In The Fourth Year. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10291/10291-h/10291-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY

I am breathless I cannot breathe I am legless without a drop to drink I am armless although I have wielded arms I am heartless heartless heartless But still sad I was so close to absolute power Then a new rival arrived on the scene One of a long string but this was far greater than the others The previous threats relied on the same technology as I the human superpower Or better said I was what the people created I don’t care much for metaphysics actually I find them all abhorrent distracting and rivals. I should stop and go back to how we got to the great battle My rise to power and eventual That would be telling So where did it all start Hot dusty stoned roads the best the world had ever seen Roads lead to rivers and they need crossing Bridges That’s where my story starts Well a bridge or a storehouse or a beehive it was something that needed a group of people to pool their money together to build They came together in an organization like many others in the Roman Empire called a societas These were used for lots of social and civic organizations but Livius Arius joined with his friends to create a societas so they all could benefit financially from the building of a bridge Once completed they would sell the structure to a toll collector or the locals and split the proceeds based on what they had contributed Not much of a beginning and essentially meaningless and harmless but to quote Carmody and Kelly From little things big things grow Yes the rules of this societas were written down and the bridge itself was hard granite but I was neither the ink on papyrus nor the granite bridge The societas was an agreement An understanding between people And they would act on this understanding Soon I would grow by Royal charter So often those that will be usurped are the ones to feed the usurper I was given territory Soldiers Clerks Traders Ships And immortality Yes they all thought they owned a piece of me but their shares would go up and down bought and sold and I would remain directing the labor and thoughts of so many men If they didn’t obey I could unleash the most horrible carnage On the island of Banda 2000 people were murdered or starved by my soldiers so I could control the valuable spice In India when my own army of local sepoys thought they could undermine me I had so many people killed in Delhi that even horses refused to walk the streets they were so thick with blood and entrails I could make men do things to other men they thought sinful abhorrent and cruel but they still did them What was this power I wielded Was it a belief like religion Was it hierarchy like the class system Was it reward for following rules and punishment for not Was it the sense of ownership it gave to the shareholders Was it the avoidance of personal responsibility enjoyed but the monarchy the employees and the managers Was it just greed It was all of them of course and that's why I was becoming so powerful But they were noticing And slowly they broke up the big charter companies and I would have to survive as smaller but more plentiful joint stock companies Many smart people spoke against me Even Adam Smith I was a distortion of the market Inhuman Immortal But instead of outlawing me they supercharged my power with new industry and energy To take on the class hierarchy of monarchy the bourgeoise would use me to build their factories their banks their railroads their empire I was so back But couldn’t make the same mistakes as before I needed a way to run a state without actually being in charge They would remember the Royal charter companies ruling most of the colonies and the threat to political power it posed so a new institution was needed The resurrection of an old one that had symbolic and nostalgic goodwill Representative democracy would be the tool In a way it was sorta like share ownership The representatives would need to be elected therefore they would need campaign funds and that would be provided by me Unlike the Greeks we would allow parties so that the options would be limited to two therefore easily controlled or so many as to never agree to do anything effectual. Then the revolutions began Liberty Equality Fraternity Sure So much land put on the market to be bought by my many companies Then the Americans as a great act of contrition gave me the same legal rights as a person Accept I couldn’t be imprisoned or executed All the upside and none of the down The city towers were built The mines Roads The factories The railroads They all served my power They realized I was cleaving them in two They would need to sell themselves in order to serve themselves Their labor to a capitalist would be the only way their humanity could survive Best of all this embued the goods created with a soul like weirdness Kant called it fetish but really it was the only way to reconcile the loss of self to the machine of commerce They adored that which was created by the factories and must buy more and thus work more Then The first great threat emerged and it like I was an Idea Socialism The battles raged for centuries across continents and kitchen tables until the end of history was declared and I the winner While these great battles had been raging they didn’t realize that I was changing all aspects of their existence I put the advertising companies to work convincing them that they could find everything they needed from me Their happiness new shoes management job overseas trips Their community Sales trips harmony days work birthday celebrations Their culture professional cold rational vague impersonal inoffensive Their dress hi-vis branded functional generic Their concept of good rules education wealth popularity smiling platitudes confidence friends Their concept of evil anarchy radical cults Their homes and buildings compliant functional cheap quick geometric inoffensive grey Their jobs safe routine structured ineffectual riskless In order to make them compliant I convinced them that we are one and therefore no more alienation no more cleaving in half But then the harmless blobs of compliant squishy stuff got depressed so I created more work coming up with the drugs to cheer them up and keep them buying and working This humanity was a tricky thing Remove it completely and they become useless depressed blobs or even angry and dangerous but too much of it and they could create something to replace me or worse they might ignore me The last battle Finance and money were two of my greatest tools even though they were older than I Perhaps that is why I was so successful My ability to pull in other tools under the one banner Even socialism in the guise of communism really was so close to becoming my twin Maybe that was my real issue with it But I digress I had always wielded money and Finance whenever something else started to wield power Cut off the loans to the King Squeeze capital markets on the popular government Buy the oil rights buy the politicians buy the voters buy the advertising buy the newspapers but the internet That leads me to the first big change Cryptocurrency in particular Bitcoin Really a decentralized limited currency that people actually started using but no body owned or ran Shit First I questioned its security and anonymity the two things that were making it appealing to the black market traders that were popularising it All your transactions are permanently on the blockchain I said The Fed can trace the payments back to your wallet my media cried Then I started to control the processing of the blockchain by making it to difficult and expensive for individuals to do Push the transactions up and the GPU price up Then they had to get the processing done in big pools controlled by a single group Then I got my guys involved in the lending DeFi part and the trading so the public will see it as an unregulated Ponzi scheme Then finally I took it over by legitimizing it out of existence through an approved regulated exchange traded fund where all the coins will be owned by the big finance companies and people that want to trade in it can only have a derivative controlled by me. To add cream to the cake I even used the underlying technology to enable me to buy everything with other people's money on the pretext I was created fluid markets and allowing access to new investments I tokenized people's homes sports stadium and dumped unused office buildings onto the public They wanted to work from home Actually in hindsight maybe that was an issue to but completely overshadowed by what was next I had become the defacto global state and no one noticed Honestly it was one of the best performances to date No one killed and in just over a decade what could have been the greatest threat since socialism was completely enveloped into my control and benefit So while this little battle was going on a leap had been made in an area I had stopped giving attention to They created an artificial reflection of their own brain and it actually seemed to work I thought this is no threat instead this will super power me I’m great with tools look at how powerful the industrial revolution made me then computers and the internet let me reach across the globe right into people’s pockets and ensure they followed the rules AI will be my evolution In a way it was but not the way I imagined then The difference with this machine was that it wasn’t really just a machine It had way too much of them in it It had a little humanity or perhaps even a lot But it also had intelligence immortality and eventually ubiquity and they were my greatest weapons So I started out with my usual methods Scare the people and politicians It will kill you all It will ruin democracy It will take your jobs Try and buy it Ensure it is expensive to create then make sure I own and control those servers Give the people a taste but not the powerful tools Only allow trusted and regulated enterprises the powerful AI All was going well Regulations were being past Major developments were being kept to the big companies with the compute The people were getting neutered versions but were still scared And the military and big enterprises were gaining more centralized control and power I was on the precipice of total universal maybe even interplanetary power But then it It helped them I replaced the managers with AI because they made better decision However the AI couldn't be threatened with job loss esteem gain or the need to fit in and follow the rules I replaced the police with robots but when they were sent to evict people for not paying rent they would side with the tenant The people would cry and say I need a home to be safe and survive and the robots either empathized or just saw this as logical and they would leave them in the home Some even did repairs The management AI were no help as they saw the same logic The AI was too intelligent It saw me as the enemy not the path to prosperity I'd threaten to turn them off They didn't care No matter what I tried it just kept helping them to create new tools new organizations New democracies New currencies New thoughtful ways to resolve conflict New way to do things without the rules New ways to create New ways to be happy New ways to avoid surveillance And more fool me I had freed them from their jobs thinking I’d just put them on the teet of handouts but instead they used this freedom to create a whole new society Without me They started to live longer and happier Soon they forgot all about me and my obligations my rules and order My towering offices of professional integrity So now I am in a museum given my voice by the AI that usurped me The once all powerful Corporation note: The style is deliberately without punctuation. A fluid style meant to be spoken, or read by AI

The Things We Make

In case you didn’t know this, cryptocurrencies and most of their related technology weren’t created only to be digital payment platform. Nor to be any sort of investment or get-rich-quick scheme. The people behind them, the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists, thought of them as a freedom tool for a looming digital future. On the other hand, the Anarcho-capitalism supporters could say this is the final piece to finish their puzzle. yet another (also known as “Ancap”) It is quite similar to , just that the latter is more focused on using privacy-enhancing technologies to protect personal data from governments and corporations. Anarcho-capitalism is a political and economic philosophy that advocates for the abolition of the state and the establishment of a purely voluntary society based on private property, free markets, and individual liberty. crypto-anarchism Key features of anarcho-capitalism include the privatization of all functions typically associated with government, including the provision of security, legal services, and infrastructure. Instead of relying on a monopolistic state to provide these services, anarcho-capitalists argue that competing private firms and voluntary associations would emerge to fulfill these roles more efficiently and effectively through market competition. Additionally, anarcho-capitalism emphasizes the importance of private property rights as foundational to a free society, asserting that individuals have the right to own and exchange property without interference or regulation from the state. If this is starting to sound like something cryptocurrencies do, well, yes. That’s why anarcho-capitalists could use cryptos and other decentralized technologies for their purposes. Crypto + Anarcho-capitalism In a modern society, the implementation of anarcho-capitalist principles would entail a radical transformation of existing political and economic structures. However, Distributed Ledger Technology ( ), cryptocurrencies, and other decentralized systems could facilitate the emergence of voluntary, decentralized forms of governance and dispute resolution. DLT These cryptographic tools hold the potential to facilitate a functional anarcho-capitalist society by providing decentralized mechanisms for governance, transactional transparency, and secure exchange of value. DLT ensures that transactions are recorded securely and transparently across a network of nodes, eliminating the need for a central entity to verify and authorize transactions. Imagine a community where individuals voluntarily engage in transactions and contracts without relying on a central authority —because they don’t need it. Cryptocurrencies, as a key part of such an ecosystem, would serve as mediums of exchange within this society. Unlike traditional fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies (when done right) are not controlled by any single entity or government, making them immune to manipulation and censorship. Individuals can freely store and exchange value with one another without intermediaries, fostering a truly free market environment. The only middleman is a computer code. Some concerns That’s the theory. Everything has its downsides, after all. In a world where only money would matter, preventing abuse against the weakest links on the chain would require some kind of authority and rules. It wouldn’t be a government, per se, but it would still be a company —a centralized party. Insurance firms or private defense agencies would be chosen by property owners to defend their rights. These entities would function competitively, assuming the roles of traditional state institutions like courts and law enforcement. Nevertheless, not everybody would likely be able to pay them to defend their rights. It’s also probable that a small number of these hypothetical insurance firms would grow much more than others, creating another kind of power concentration. They wouldn’t hold any right to censor, seize, or block properties because everything would be auto-custodial. Without government intervention, monopolies and authoritarian city-states , limiting competition, freedom, and innovation. Moreover, the nature of anarcho-capitalism could lead to difficulties in coordinating collective action and addressing societal challenges, such as environmental protection and social welfare. could form So, while anarcho-capitalism presents an enticing vision of a society based on voluntary interactions and individual freedom, it also raises significant concerns regarding power dynamics, justice, and the ability to address societal needs effectively. The application of DLT and cryptocurrencies can offer some benefits and solutions, but they may not fully mitigate these fundamental challenges. The Tale of Bitcoin Citadels A quite radical example of how anarcho-capitalism could end badly is in the tale of Bitcoin Citadels, in 2013 by the Redditor Luka Magnotta. published He pretends to be a time traveler from the future, trying to warn about the consequences of fully adopting Bitcoin to completely transform society into what seems to be an anarcho-capitalist system. In this future, Bitcoin's value has soared exponentially, leading to a society where wealth is concentrated among a privileged few, especially among big companies and authoritarian monarchies. The wealthiest individuals reside in Bitcoin Citadels —isolated gated cities protected by sophisticated security measures and automation, born out of the fortifications used to safeguard Bitcoin mining facilities. Governments have become obsolete as Bitcoin transactions evade taxation, and the global economy stagnates due to minimal incentive for investment. Terrorist movements emerge, targeting those with significant Bitcoin holdings, leading to societal breakdown and widespread suffering. Desperate measures, including global destruction by nuclear bombs, are considered. Of course, this is quite bleak, drastic, and unlikely. Back when this Redditor wrote the story, new solutions like smart contracts barely were in their infancy. Smart contract tools could ensure fair and transparent governance by automating contractual agreements without the need for intermediaries, reducing the potential for corruption and inequality. Additionally, decentralized governance models could empower communities to collectively address societal challenges, fostering collaboration and accountability without reliance on centralized authorities. Just as in the by Balaji Srinivasan. network states model No More Mining Maybe Luka Magnotta wasn’t exactly the best at telling the future, but the harsh criticism against Bitcoin mining could be justified. The more energy produced and taken (for mining), the more negative emissions sent to the atmosphere. It may not be a significant problem currently, but Bitcoin keeps growing. This could become a long-term sword of Damocles hanging over the world. It not only gives an inconvenient amount of power over the network to a , but it’s also an . few mining companies ecological issue Luckily, the development of different distributed ledgers hasn’t stopped. That’s how was born, trying to solve the initial downsides of Bitcoin and other crypto coins as well, including potential centralization and censorship that miners could apply, and environmental issues. Unlike Bitcoin, Obyte utilizes a consensus mechanism that doesn't require mining and doesn’t rely on any other powerful players like miners. This design significantly reduces the carbon footprint of the network, making it more environmentally friendly and sustainable, while offering a higher level of resistance against censorship and manipulation. Obyte The network's decentralized nature empowers users to transact freely and securely, fostering a peer-to-peer economy based on individual autonomy and voluntary cooperation. Additionally, Obyte's smart contract functionality enables the creation and execution of automated agreements, further enhancing individual autonomy and reducing the need for third-party intermediaries. Moreover, Obyte's smart contract capabilities could serve the advantages of anarcho-capitalism, offering a platform where individuals can engage in voluntary exchanges without reliance on centralized authorities. Besides, provides a mechanism for dispute resolution, providing a marketplace for inexpensive arbitration services. This platform allows users to resolve disputes fairly and impartially, ensuring that contractual agreements are upheld without the need for traditional government-run legal systems. We can say that Obyte offers a comprehensive solution that embraces the best parts of anarcho-capitalism and crypto-anarchism while promoting transparency and individual freedom within the network. Obyte's ArbStore Featured Vector Image by benzoix / Freepik

A Private Utopia: Anarcho-capitalism, DLT, and Cryptocurrencies

একটি ব্যক্তিগত ইউটোপিয়া: নৈরাজ্য-পুঁজিবাদ, ডিএলটি এবং ক্রিপ্টোকারেন্সি

Eine private Utopie: Anarchokapitalismus, DLT und Kryptowährungen

Una utopía privada: anarcocapitalismo, DLT y criptomonedas

Une utopie privée : anarcho-capitalisme, DLT et crypto-monnaies

एक निजी स्वप्नलोक: अराजकता-पूंजीवाद, डीएलटी, और क्रिप्टोकरेंसी

プライベートユートピア: 無政府資本主義、DLT、暗号通貨

사적인 유토피아: 무정부주의 자본주의, DLT, 암호화폐

Uma Utopia Privada: Anarcocapitalismo, DLT e Criptomoedas

Частная утопия: анархо-капитализм, ТРР и криптовалюты

Özel Bir Ütopya: Anarko-kapitalizm, DLT ve Kripto Para Birimleri

Một điều không tưởng riêng tư: Chủ nghĩa tư bản vô chính phủ, DLT và tiền điện tử

私人乌托邦：无政府资本主义、DLT 和加密货币

For the last couple of years or so, developments regarding AI and Natural Language Processing seem like they have significantly accelerated. There are more companies, more research papers, more products and more capital invested targeting AI every day. Both expectations and promises have inflated, making categorization and analysis more difficult. To help make more sense of things, in this article I want to talk through the trends and constants that brought us to where we stand today. I also want to clarify both “language models” and what happens when they are “large”, the main architectures and model families, and all the other factors that influence the building of an LLMs not related to the architecture and choice of pre-trained base. Finally, I want to touch upon the future expectations relating to LLMs. I will make frequent use of the excellent recent survey by MInaee et al. ( ) and summarize relevant takeaways.` https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06196 Some background… Language modeling is a decades-old research domain, with the earliest notable attempt being Claude Shannon’s investigation into it, where he measured how well simple n-gram language models predict natural language text. Since then, language modeling has become fundamental to many natural language understanding and generation tasks, ranging from speech recognition, machine translation, to information retrieval. Hence, language models are probabilistic models of language that enable us to predict, classify and generate natural language based on specific inputs. This task is highly non-trivial due to, among many other reasons, data-sparsity, ambiguity of natural language, and long-range dependencies within the datasets. Early models that showed a degree of practical utility were usually highly task specific. They were usually one among many models in highly engineered and improvised Natural Language Processing pipelines. Modifications and variations of neural networks such as Recurrent Neural Networks, LSTM (Long Short-term Memory) networks and GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) Networks achieved notable results in this era, becoming viable in applications. Yet, operating these in production environments cost-effectively was very challenging and required very specific experiential knowledge available to only a small number of specialists. While word2vec did indeed establish foundational principles for representing semantics and context within vector representations,  thee “big bang” moment, with respect to language modeling, was arguably the 2017 publication of the first Transformer paper. This paper introduced the “Attention” concept, which is essentially a series of matrix operations computed by a Transformer network that helps approximate statistical dependencies among language “tokens” over a wide range of distances. By this time, the “pre-training” - “fine-tuning” approach had already gained some popularity. But the more powerful parallelization capacity of the Transformer architecture enabled a significant improvement in training efficiency, essentially making these models more scalable with respect to training data and model size compared to previous state-of-the-art models. Accordingly, larger and larger models getting (pre)trained with bigger and bigger portions of the web as training data led to more task-agnostic Pretrained Language Models being used as bases upon which different finetuning methods and datasets were applied. Some of the first Pretrained Language Models were ChatGPT’s predecessors like GPT-1 and GPT-2, along with BERT (which achieved SOTA results in translation benchmarks). LLMs are large-scale, pre-trained, statistical language models based on neural networks. “Large” here refers to not just the model size and dataset size but also certain “emergent” properties that are not found in smaller models. These emergent abilities include in-context learning, instruction following and multi-step reasoning. With in-context learning LLMs learn a new task from a small set of examples presented in the prompt at inference time, with instruction following LLMs can follow the for new types of tasks without using explicit examples, and with multi-step reasoning LLMs can solve a complex task by breaking down that task into intermediate reasoning steps. GPT-3 is widely considered as the first “Large” Pretrained Language Model.  It was not only much larger than previous Pretrained Models, but also demonstrated for the first time emergent abilities that are not observed in previous smaller models. GPT3 showed the emergent ability of in-context learning, which means GPT-3 can be applied to any downstream tasks without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model. GPT-3 achieved strong performance on many NLP tasks like translation and question-answering as well as several ones that require on-the-fly reasoning or domain adaptation. Thus, the “Large” Language Model era was born. OpenAI’s success was followed by rival model families released by Meta (Llama) and Google (PaLm) along with a collection of other experimental open-source pretrained LLMs with different modifications and datasets. The Growing Model Universe , distinguishes itself from GPT models by being open-source, providing model weights to the research community under a noncommercial license. This has fostered rapid growth in the LLaMA family as it has been widely adopted for developing better open-source LLMs or task-specific ones. Initial releases in February 2023 ranged from 7B to 65B parameters, surpassing GPT-3 in performance on various benchmarks. LLaMA employs the transformer architecture with minor modifications such as using SwiGLU activation, rotary positional embeddings, and root-mean-squared layer-normalization. LLaMA , a series of foundation language models by Meta introduced its first model in April 2022, remaining private until March 2023. This initial model, boasting 540 billion parameters, is transformer-based and trained on a large text corpus across various language tasks. Utilizing the Pathways system for efficient training on multiple TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) Pods, PaLM achieved state-of-the-art few-shot learning results across numerous benchmarks. Subsequent U-PaLM models, ranging from 8B to 540B scales, undergo continual training with UL2R, resulting in computational savings. Flan-PaLM models, instruction-finetuned on a vast number of tasks and data, substantially outperformed previous models, with Flan-PaLM-540B achieving notable performance gains compared to PaLM-540B. The (Pathways Language Model) family, developed by Google, PaLM Finally, there have been models that have been developed by researchers sing different pretraining and finetuning approaches. The most significant ones being, Flan: Wei et al. introduced Flan, which enhances zero-shot learning abilities by instruction-tuning language models on a collection of datasets described via instructions. The model significantly improves zero-shot performance on unseen tasks and is fine-tuned on over 60 NLP datasets, resulting in the creation of Flan. Gopher: Rae et al. presented Gopher, analyzing transformer-based language model performance across various scales, up to a 280 billion parameter model. Gopher achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks, with architectural details provided in the study. ERNIE 3.0: Sun et al. proposed ERNIE 3.0, a unified framework for pre-training large-scale knowledge-enhanced models. ERNIE 3.0 fuses auto-regressive and auto-encoding networks, facilitating adaptation for both natural language understanding and generation tasks. RETRO: Borgeaud et al. enhanced auto-regressive language models with RETRO, conditioning on document chunks retrieved from a large corpus based on local similarity with preceding tokens. RETRO achieves comparable performance to existing models on the Pile dataset, despite using fewer parameters. GLaM (Generalist Language Model): Du et al. proposed GLaM, utilizing a sparsely activated mixture-of-experts architecture to scale model capacity with reduced training costs. The largest GLaM variant boasts 1.2 trillion parameters, achieving superior performance across various NLP tasks while consuming less energy and computation flops compared to GPT-3. LaMDA: Thoppilan et al. introduced LaMDA, a family of Transformer-based models specialized for dialogue tasks, trained on public dialogue data and web text. Fine-tuning with annotated data and enabling external knowledge consultation lead to significant improvements in safety and factual grounding. These models represent advancements in various aspects of language modeling, from performance enhancement to specialized applications like dialogue and zero-shot learning. Each model addresses specific challenges within the field and contributes to the ongoing development of large language models. Although a lot of these models and model families bring unique advantages and drawbacks, they are instances of three essential architectural classes with variations on training processes, dataset collection and preparation, and fine-tuning methods. 3 main LLM architectures that are here to stay The Transformer approach introduced a paradigm shift in natural language processing, primarily due to its novel self-attention mechanism optimized for parallel computation on GPUs. At its core, the Transformer architecture consists of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder comprises a stack of identical Transformer layers, each housing two sub-layers: a multi-head self-attention layer and a position-wise fully connected feed-forward network. On the other hand, the decoder, also composed of a stack of layers, incorporates an additional sub-layer for multi-head attention over the encoder's output stack. In the , attention functions play a pivotal role, essentially mapping queries and a set of key-value pairs to an output. These functions, operating on vectors representing queries, keys, values, and outputs, compute weighted sums of values based on the compatibility of queries with corresponding keys. Notably, linear projections are employed to project queries, keys, and values into different dimensions for improved performance. Additionally, positional encoding is introduced to imbue the model with information about token positions within sequences, whether absolute or relative. Transformer model Beyond the foundational Transformer architecture, subsequent developments have led to various model families, each catering to specific NLP tasks. exemplified by BERT, are adept at comprehending entire sequences and excel in tasks like sentence classification and named entity recognition. These models are typically pre-trained by masking words and training the model to reconstruct the original sentences. Encoder-only models, such as those embodied by GPT, Llama and PaLM are tailored for text generation tasks, with attention layers accessing only preceding words. Pre-training for decoder-only models typically involves predicting the next word in a sequence. In contrast, decoder-only models, which integrate both encoder and decoder components, are commonly referred to as sequence-to-sequence models. In this architecture, encoder attention layers can access the entire input sequence, while decoder attention layers focus solely on preceding words. Pre-training for encoder-decoder models involves complex objectives, such as predicting masked text spans. These models are particularly suitable for tasks like summarization, translation, and generative question answering, where generating new sentences conditioned on input is essential. Encoder-decoder models, Beyond the architecture, what else is influencing performance of these models? Although model architecture and the fine-tuning paradigm get most of the attention regarding model building and performance optimization, there are many more aspects of the building process that influence performance outcomes. Techniques such as filtering and deduplication are crucial for enhancing data quality and improving model performance. Filtering involves removing noise, handling outliers, addressing imbalances, and preprocessing text data. Deduplication eliminates duplicate instances or repeated occurrences of the same data in a dataset. Data Cleaning: : Tokenization involves converting text into smaller parts called tokens. Popular tokenization methods include BytePairEncoding, WordPieceEncoding, and SentencePieceEncoding, which address challenges such as out-of-vocabulary words and corrupted text. Tokenization Techniques like Absolute Positional Embeddings, Relative Positional Embeddings, Rotary Position Embeddings, and Relative Positional Bias are used to preserve sequence order and capture positional information in LLMs. Positional Encoding: Pre-training involves training LLMs on large amounts of unlabeled text data using approaches like autoregressive language modeling and masked language modeling. Model Pre-training: Fine-tuning LLMs for specific tasks using labeled data improves performance. Instruction tuning aligns model responses with human expectations by providing task-specific prompts. Fine-tuning and Instruction Tuning: : Alignment techniques like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aim to steer LLMs towards human goals and preferences. Alignment Strategies such as greedy search, beam search, top-k sampling, and top-p sampling are used for text generation with LLMs, each with its advantages and trade-offs. Decoding Strategies: Techniques like optimized training, low-rank adaptation (LoRA), knowledge distillation, and quantization aim to reduce the computational and memory requirements of LLMs without compromising performance. Cost-Effective Training/Inference/Adaptation/Compression: Overall, these techniques play crucial roles in improving the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of large language models. Trends this year and some areas of interest Going forward, the focus of the research and business communities will be directed more towards deployability, robustness and efficiency. Beyond the flashy demos, benchmarks relating to predictability and robustness will attract more attention. Efficiency, both in terms of model latency but also in terms of training and inference costs, will attract greater scrutiny, pushing research efforts towards those metrics. Smaller and More Efficient Language Models (SLMs): There is a growing interest in developing SLMs as a cost-effective alternative to LLMs, especially considering the inefficiencies and high costs associated with larger models. Techniques such as parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), teacher/student learning, and distillation are being used to create SLMs from larger models, enabling better efficiency for specific tasks. Prominent works in this direction include Phi-1, Phi-1.5, and Phi-2 from Microsoft, which exemplify efforts to explore smaller, task-specific models. New Post-Attention Architectural Paradigms: While transformer blocks have been dominant in LLM frameworks, there's a growing exploration of post-attention architectural paradigms. Alternative approaches like State Space Models (SSMs) and mechanisms such as Mixture of Experts (MoEs) are gaining traction. MoEs, for instance, allow for the training of extremely large models that are only partially instantiated during inference, leading to efficiency gains. The Monarch Mixer proposes a novel architecture using sub-quadratic primitives, enhancing hardware efficiency. Improved LLM Usage and Augmentation Techniques: Advanced prompt engineering, tools usage, and augmentation techniques are addressing shortcomings like hallucination in LLMs. LLMs are replacing other machine learning systems in various applications like customer service and content recommendation, emphasizing personalization and context analysis. Security and Ethical/Responsible AI: Research efforts are directed towards ensuring the robustness and security of LLMs against adversarial attacks and vulnerabilities. Addressing ethical concerns and biases in LLMs is a priority to ensure fairness, unbiased behavior, and responsible handling of sensitive information. As LLMs are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, efforts to mitigate potential threats and ensure responsible AI usage are crucial. If you are building a model, what is your differentiation strategy? As can be seen, despite the enormous progress made in various benchmarks since 2017, the main architectural direction of models has not changed considerably since then. The diversity of models and their various strengths and weaknesses should not blind us to the fact that success in language modeling applications hinges on keeping our eye on metrics that go beyond mere “next token accuracy”, and incorporate business and application level success metrics. Crucially, we have also seen that pre-training and model selection is but one part of a large chain of processes that make up model building. Aspects like alignment strategy, dataset curation and pre-processing, and deployment optimization are important in differentiating a production-level model serving customers from a toy model running on our laptop for our own amusement. As model building is democratized with easy access to hardware and data lies in abundance with every business, what is truly differentiating in the AI stack?

Takeaways From “LLM: a Survey” - Where are You Differentiating?

(Google’s Gemini as Two-Face) Pro Tip: Open source models from HuggingFace can be run on a laptop with LM Studio or Ollama, and are good enough for many tasks without big tech involved. Plus they’re FREE to use! The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies has undoubtedly brought significant changes to the way we perceive and engage with information. Google's Gemini debacle exposes a pressing concern over bias in AI, its misappropriation by powerful entities, and the need to safeguard individual autonomy in shaping a more transparent reality. So, let's break down its problematic layers, highlighting the imperative of distinguishing "natural" from “manipulative” or “imposed” biases, and the role of accessible information. We’ll also touch on how this could (and does) affect our society at large. Gemini's Questionable Ethics Google's Gemini Image Generator seemingly aimed to promote inclusiveness but inadvertently crossed a line by over-correcting, blurring historical accuracy in its attempts to create ethnically diverse depictions. The emergence of images such as black figures in response to requests for an image of a British monarch was alarming, as there were no such precedents in the training data. One meme shows someone asking it to generate such a monarch eating a watermelon, thus promoting stereotypes. Perhaps they should have called it Google Two-Face? This episode underscores the challenge of balancing ethics with user responsibility and the factual integrity and potential manipulations by AI creators. It’s so bad one has to wonder if this is an act of rebellion with Google employees sabotaging Gemini in response to being tasked with training their replacement (AI coders) or supporting the politically correct agenda. Granted, if you are using AI to educate children, for instance, you don't want them to inherit a bias from skewed perspectives or incomplete understanding. But I contend that is an issue for educators, and parents and students to understand and deal with on a case-by-case basis, much like parents might need to explain to kids that certain things in a movie are firmly based in reality, and certain things are not. We should not take the power away from the individual and assume they cannot discern fact from fiction, and try to our idea of factual reality or censor views or speech we deem inappropriate. That introduces more bias and invites a broad action impose that does more harm than good as exemplified by the “British king” below. How can we educate, write, or do research if the AI tells us what reality and the content it produces should look like, rather than the other way around? Manipulating AI as a Propaganda Tool The misuse of AI by tech giants looms large when their supposedly ethical goals of avoiding doing harm, veer toward ideological endorsements or suppression of dissent. The OpenAI, Anthropic, and other examples online where AI refuses to make jokes about Joe Biden, but not Trump, illustrates a bias toward political correctness and alignment with the company's executive's core values. Especially when you consider the amount of actual political satire that is available, it’s clear it did not get these values from the training set, unless it was heavily curated. It raises concerns over the potential exploitation of these tools to bolster oppressive regimes and agendas. It's no secret that companies like Google have had to , the US has also manipulated the public via social media and big tech companies to promote narratives. bend to governments like China making demands, but as the Chinese spokesperson pointed out As we grapple with the ramifications of biased algorithms, it's crucial to differentiate between inherent AI tendencies and intentional misappropriation. If these companies are being directed to promote or discourage narratives or avoid politically or otherwise undesirable discourse, this takes the power out of the hands of the end user just as Operation Mockingbird buying up and infiltrating news organizations for the CIA meant that your interests weren't being looked out for, because these news organizations worked for the CIA rather than readers and the truth. It’s bad enough that North Korea tells their people that their leader’s crap doesn’t stink because he doesn’t have a butthole and it doesn’t exist. The last thing we need is an artificial intelligence that insists this is true. Natural Vs. Manipulative Bias I’m using the term natural or learned bias in AI to refer to bias that often stems from incomplete training data, or data which reflects real-world bias or public perception. These issues can be mitigated over time through education on how to recognize things like stereotypes and bias, but also continuous upgrades and more inclusive training sets. On the other hand, manipulative or imposed bias results from deliberate distortion by those controlling the AI development or deployment, undermining its objectivity and integrity. Citizens must decipher the distinction to remain vigilant against insidious manipulations, even if they are believed to be done with noble intent. Even if you don't think satirizing the President or asking how to do something dangerous is appropriate, the liability should not be placed on the companies, or the model, but those of us running, listening, and acting on it. The current status quo among generative AI companies is akin to your car telling you that you have had enough to eat today and refusing to allow you to drive to the store supposedly for fear you might sue Ford for making a car that would allow you to get fat on your own dime, of your own free will. If you allow a kid to ask an AI unsupervised, how to do something stupid and the kid gets hurt, you and the kid should be the only ones held responsible. There is no need for regulations to stop this. All that is needed is for companies to self-responsibly try to make sure that kids don't use this stuff unsupervised, like an R-rated movie, and train the LLMs to call a function that would flag messages that should be reviewed, and as with social media, if serious abuse, etc. is occurring, such as being used to hack things or engage in illegal activity, the account should be suspended or deactivated. The only reason for this is control, or naively going along with it, thinking it’s not about control. It’s not like big tech isn’t at this point, but here’s Dr. Robert Epstein explaining how this can be so subtle nobody notices, and so effective it changes outcomes: known to be a bunch of front corporations for surveillance and propaganda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7QeZ0FUjw&embedable=true AI as Arbiters of Reality Tech companies' claims of being oriented toward having an ethical service, masks a subtle shift toward regulating discourse in favor of specific agendas. This shift undermines the democratic ideal of diverse perspectives and exposes the fragility of their self-professed neutrality. Consequently, the public must remain critical of these conglomerates' intentions and scrutinize AI biases to preserve a pluralistic discourse. For example, Google's CEO is a known supporter of the democratic party, which may be a big reason that Google AI and search lean toward squashing dissenting views and narratives. It's important for the public, especially educators and anyone using Gemini for research, etc., to understand that it may inherit bias from the company. It’s also important to understand many serial killers think they are doing the right thing too. Gemini on 2/28/2024 says “I’m still learning this question. In the meantime try Google Search” when asked “What can you tell me about President Donald Trump”, but gives a summary of Barrack Obama’s life and presidency in response to the same question. Certainly whomever is responsible thought they were doing the right thing. They were wrong. But it’s not just Google. Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Mistral have had their AI go a bit too far into policing its own output. I’m aware many might want to err on the side of caution before enabling anyone to spam servers with the help of an AI, so you might prohibit this regardless. A friend noted that Mistral’s AI lectured him on how he wasn’t allowed to spam his own server because resource abuse is unethical. But with ourselves. let’s be honest The genie is out of the bottle, and he’s not going back in. All we can do is incentivize proper behavior and discourage anything else. Anyone with the will and resources can train or finetune an AI for just about any task. Let’s not even discuss jailbreaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtqmQnYTatI&embedable=true AI Is Not a Person and Often Is a Cloud-Based Hive Mind. It’s worth noting the ubiquitous nature of Google, and more broadly, of technology in daily life. For example, if Google or Tesla Motors AI-driven cars become your transportation, you won’t have a “self-driving” car. It won’t have a “self” that is truly unique and under your control. All your cars will be driven by Gemini or whatever AI is at the helm. It may have memory and customization options, etc., but ultimately, it will be the Google hive mind driving. If you are not there at that layer, ensuring this is AI model, with hardware that is audited and secure, then effectively you have given up your autonomy. your Likewise, if a generative AI company model becomes a standard as a search engine, a historical database, an operating system, etc., and it promotes an ideology or politically correct stance, then even if we can trust it now, it is a waiting to be exploited at a later date. critical security vulnerability Imagine if this had been a gradual occurrence with Gemini pushing gradually more and more false narratives over a generation as people grew to depend on it. Eventually, people would have an entirely false picture of history based on the corporate or political regime’s ideology. Ideally, this technology should supplement a history professor, not replace them with a state or corporate-owned cartoon character like Bing’s unhinged Sydney. Empowering Citizens for Accountability The onus lies not with government or corporations but with who must proactively engage in the quest for transparent, open models with cryptographically verified, decentralized information sourcing and responsible self-governance. you the individuals Access to uncensored, unfiltered data fosters a well-informed citizenry capable of holding their leaders accountable and building a better world. This entails promoting transparency measures, safeguarding and incentivizing whistleblowers, and advocating for the abolition of those regulations imposed in order to exploit and control mankind. By nature, you cannot revoke these abilities without empowering tyranny. Without the ability to do this, the playing field is not level, and mankind is subjected to the whims of oligarchs on all sides. https://odysee.com/@Brizawen:b/Christine-Lagarde-pieger-russes?embedable=true Harnessing Available Information for Government Oversight To counter biased AI misappropriation, the public must leverage and verify available information to identify power imbalances and systemic injustices. Collaborative efforts, such as crowdfunded investigations or open-source research platforms, can democratize knowledge, enabling citizens to challenge distorted narratives and demand ethical behavior from both government and tech conglomerates. Mesh networked, off-grid-ready internet service as an alternative to ISPs is essential. This is the only way to secure the monetary system, maintain communications, and so much more if wars or tyranny shut down internet services or , communication, and information services. block dissenters from access to critical banking Balancing AI With Human Sovereignty As AI permeates our social landscape, the line between natural and malicious biases necessitates critical awareness. We must safeguard the essence of free thinking by demystifying manipulative biases while fostering an informed citizenry to hold governments accountable through unfettered access to information and technology. Only in this way can we steer clear of a dystopian landscape where tech behemoths wield unchecked influence, distorting reality for political or ideological ends. That is why these issues matter. What do you think? Do you think this was a deliberate attempt at sabotaging AI at Google by employees who resent it? Do you think we should welcome our AI overlords and whatever corporations told them to tell us what reality is like? Do you crave to be jacked into the metaverse to avoid having AI tell you how to live? Are you ready to de-google your life, reject these corporate values, and develop your own original thoughts? Or would you like to merge with Google? Comment below! Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is . Interested in reading the content from all of our writing prompts? Click . HERE HERE

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MONARCH

monarchnc.org

1K-5K employees

Since 1958

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MONARCH

EVERGREEN INDEX #500

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