Russia already had an agreement with Ukraine to respect the 1994 boundaries of Ukraine - the Budapest Memorandum.
It’s like if someone promised not to burgle your house. Then they burgle your house anyway - but promise they’ll stop burgling for real if you promise to let them keep the stuff they already took, and throw in some more, and promise to never to lock your doors.
Stargate SG-1, Season 4, Episode 6 has a variant of the loop trope, but everyone (including most of the protagonists, and everyone else on earth) don’t remember what happens, while two protagonists remember every loop until they are able to stop the looping.
They debrief the others who don’t remember at the end (except for the things they did when they took a loop off anyway!) - but they didn’t miss too much since everyone else on earth missed it.
Another fictional work - a book, not a movie / TV show / anime - is Stephen Fry’s 1996 novel Making History. The time travel aspect is questionable - he sends things back in time to stop Hitler being born, but no people travel through time. However, he remembers the past before his change, and has to deal with the consequences of having the wrong memories relative to everyone else.
54 kg of fentanyl is an insane amount to have all in one place.
Just to put it in perspective:
I’m not sure why they’d stockpile so much in one place, given they apparently have the capacity to manufacture more - unless they were planning to use it to kill people (see: they also had a weapons cache and explosives) instead of to sell as a drug. Or perhaps the 54 kg is an exaggeration and includes packaging and so on.
Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.
I believe it is what Americans call what might be called an Owners Corporation / Body Corporate / Apartment Owners Association / Management Company in other parts of the English-speaking world.
Starlink is a constellation of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, not geostationary satellites. That means that the ground station (i.e. subscriber equipment) talks to one satellite as it comes into view, and over time that satellite moves across the sky, and they switch to another satellite. This means the latency is highly variable as the distance changes, but at its lowest is much lower than a geostationary satellite since it is far closer.
In the modern sense, I think most people would take the word “democracy” to include universal suffrage - at a minimum, all adults born or granted citizenship there should have the equal right to vote for it to be considered a democracy.
In practice, Israel has substantial control over the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, between Egypt and Lebanon (that is not to say that they should, just the reality) - in the sense that anyone in that area’s lives are significantly controlled by Israeli government decisions, and the Israeli government and military operates over that entire area.
So the minimum bar for it being a democracy is that adults - including the people with ancestral ties to the area that it controls - get an equal say in the governance. That is clearly not the case, and has not been for quite some time; it not being a democracy is not a recent development (maybe it’s never actually been a true democracy).
The mission to mars will be well after he builds the hyper loop across California, US, and Tesla implements full self driving. In other words, it’s something he told investors to secure their investment for something shorter term, while making it sound like he’s thinking far into the future.
And if he ever does sacrifice some suckers to keep up appearances, I don’t think he’d put up his hand to be one of them!
An exchange of nuclear weapons would be expected to ignite many fires and to spread dust and fallout into the atmosphere - similar to a large scale bush fire, volcanic eruption or a meteorite hit, depending on the size and number of weapons. This would have a chilling and darkening effect on the climate, causing crop failures worldwide. A world-wide nuclear winter effect would impact everyone, not just the parties to the conflict.
That’s why, for all the posturing and sabre rattling, even the most belligerent states don’t want a nuclear war - it means destruction of all sides, and massive casualties around the world.
Here’s an idea: if the US wants a say in the ICC, maybe they should sign the Rome Statute.
When Russia adopts economic policy from satire: https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
They don’t have any leverage, because the people calling the shots in Israel (and to be clear, that is the likes of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who want effectively no Arabs river to sea, and hence Netanyahu, who I think would do just about any atrocity no matter how abhorrent just to stay in power and out of jail) value the pretext to invade far more than they value the lives of the hostages.
So the hostages do not actually give Hamas any leverage over Israel - hence why Israel is not willing to agree to anything. Hamas should not have taken civilians hostage or targeted civilians in the first place, and they should release them. That is still an ongoing war crime, even if it is overshadowed by bigger ones being perpetrated by the Israeli side.
Hamas never had a chance of winning on military might.
The best chance for a good outcome for the Palestinian people is through raising awareness of the plight of the Palestinians, resulting in international pressure. The pressure against Israel arising now is because of the severity of Israel’s war crimes, while Hamas’ war crimes are one of the key talking points used to justify not taking action. Hamas could help Palestine win the information space war by taking the high road; winning a military war is futile for them.
While it is not fair to punish Palestinian civilians for the war crimes of Hamas just because the interests of Palestinian civilians are aligned to Hamas’ goals, there are many people who don’t see it that way. Palestinian statehood (or a non-apartheid one-state solution) would now get far more international support if the Palestinian militants shifted to peaceful resistance.
No
On economic policy I am quite far left - I support a low Gini coefficient, achieved through a mixed economy, but with state provided options (with no ‘think of the businesses’ pricing strategy) for the essentials and state owned options for natural monopolies / utilities / media.
But on social policy, I support social liberties and democracy. I believe the government should intervene, with force if needed, to protect the rights of others from interference by others (including rights to bodily safety and autonomy, not to be discriminated against, the right to a clean and healthy environment, and the right not to be exploited or misled by profiteers) and to redistribute wealth from those with a surplus to those in need / to fund the legitimate functions of the state. Outside of that, people should have social and political liberties.
I consider being a ‘tankie’ to require both the leftist aspect (✅) and the authoritarian aspect (❌), so I don’t meet the definition.
The fears people who like to talk about the singularity like to propose is that there will be one ‘rogue’ misaligned ASI that progressively takes over everything - i.e. all the AI in the world works against all the people.
My point is that more likely is there will be lots of ASI or AGI systems, not aligned to each other, most on the side of the humans.
I think any prediction based on a ‘singularity’ neglects to consider the physical limitations, and just how long the journey towards significant amounts of AGI would be.
The human brain has an estimated 100 trillion neuronal connections - so probably a good order of magnitude estimation for the parameter count of an AGI model.
If we consider a current GPU, e.g. the 12 GB GFX 3060, it can hold about 24 billion parameters at 4 bit quantisation (in reality a fair few less), and uses 180 W of power. So that means an AGI might use 750 kW of power to operate. A super-intelligent machine might use more. That is a farm of 2500 300W solar panels, while the sun is shining, just for the equivalent of one person.
Now to pose a real threat against the billions of humans, you’d need more than one person’s worth of intelligence. Maybe an army equivalent to 1,000 people, powered by 8,333,333 GPUs and 2,500,000 solar panels.
That is not going to materialise out of the air too quickly.
In practice, as we get closer to an AGI or ASI, there will be multiple separate deployments of similar sizes (within an order of magnitude), and they won’t be aligned to each other - some systems will be adversaries of any system executing a plan to destroy humanity, and will be aligned to protect against harm (AI technologies are already widely used for threat analysis). So you’d have a bunch of malicious systems, and a bunch of defender systems, going head to head.
The real AI risks, which I think many of the people ranting about singularities want to obscure, are:
I’m looking into it using data from my instance to check it isn’t an abuse issue.
What I know so far:
Votes on this comment:
If there are instances that are a significant source of vote manipulation, and the local admins are unwilling to address it, there are options available to instance admins like defederation.
However - in the case of your comments, there is no meaningful evidence of vote manipulation.
I think the most striking thing is that for outsiders (i.e. non repo members) the acceptance rates for gendered are lower by a large and significant amount compared to non-gendered, regardless of the gender on Google+.
The definition of gendered basically means including the name or photo. In other words, putting your name and/or photo as your GitHub username is significantly correlated with decreased chances of a PR being merged as an outsider.
I suspect this definition of gendered also correlates heavily with other forms of discrimination. For example, name or photo likely also reveals ethnicity or skin colour in many cases. So an alternative hypothesis is that there is racism at play in deciding which PRs people, on average, accept. This would be a significant confounding factor with gender if the gender split of Open Source contributors is different by skin colour or ethnicity (which is plausible if there are different gender roles in different nations, and obviously different percentages of skin colour / ethnicity in different nations).
To really prove this is a gender effect they could do an experiment: assign participants to submit PRs either as a gendered or non-gendered profile, and measure the results. If that is too hard, an alternative for future research might be to at least try harder to compensate for confounding effects.
I think (unless I misunderstood the paper), they only included people who had a Google+ profile with a gender specified in the study at all (this is from 2016 when Google were still trying to make Google+ a thing).
He is not going to run for president again ever in a free and fair election in accordance with the US constitution; that would require changing the constitution in ways that the Republicans don’t have the numbers for, or at least interpreting the existing constitution in a way that is so contorted I don’t think even the most conservative supreme court judges could support it.
So in other words, he does not need anything from the American public anymore. He has no reason to care if part of his base opens their eyes to what he really is (at least, as long as at least 1/12th of the public will vote not to convict on any jury - but he can also self-pardon for anything except impeachment).
I therefore don’t think the kompromat theory holds much water today.
More likely, the Russians calculate that this is an opportunity to sow division in the US - they’d hope for a civil war as the best case. Supporting Trump, as a divisive president, was a start, but they wouldn’t want too many people happy with Trump either, so they want to make the haters hate him even more than is rational, and the sycophants continue to love him more.
Of course, the risk for them is that they make Trump want to support Ukraine to a greater extent than the US currently is, instead of the opposite. They probably calculate he is incompetent and nothing much will change for them either way. Trump is certainly installing yes-men who will be loyal to him but likely not the most competent leaders; this is an effective way to disrupt a government, but it is likely that a declining narcissist who has structured things to remove all dissent will not be at all effective in achieving outcomes that require complex strategy and coordinated execution. So I think they probably consider this risk to be acceptable.