The glaring difference between the two is our level of active involvement.
Solidarity is one thing. Actually doing something about Sudan would require some sort of deliberate intervention.
In the case of Gaza we could likely make a huge difference if we just stopped arming the aggressors.
We don’t send arms to Sudan. We don’t send arms to Putin. We don’t send arms to the Sri Lankan military. We don’t send arms to Boko Haram. We don’t send arms to Myanmar.
I’ve been thinking about this exact question recently.
My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn’t realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn’t really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn’t much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.
None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn’t have been held accountable.
History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
The world is watching.
It’s a bit more than “nobody”.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/09/1154391
The problem is that the minority that is uncomfortable doing or saying anything is backed by half the worlds carrier fleets and thousands of nuclear armed ICBMS.
Maybe.
There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.
When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn’t understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.
No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
The sound effects in old radio shows and movies wouldn’t fool modern audiences either.
Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.
I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we’ll reach an equilibrium where most people won’t fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.
Haha. Maybe.
I doubt the VCs will provide much followup funding if they can’t control the code base but weirder things have happened.
There are a lot of scams around AI and there’s a lot of very serious science.
While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.
The reason we don’t see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it’s mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn’t apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they’ve been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.
It’s otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.
In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone’s work and produced something strikingly similar. That’s not what happened here.
This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn’t about what the AI did it’s about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn’t copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can’t just remove the APL2.0 from some work it’s attached to.
It isn’t even the root of the indo-european languages and the Indo-European languages are just one of many language families around the world.
Source I am from Austria. :)
Allies are only ever allies of convenience.
The US was allied with both the USSR and China for the sake of convenience. Right after that war the US allied with its erstwhile enemies, Japan, Germany and Italy for the sake of convenience. The Marshal Islands maintain diplomatic relations with both China and the US for their own convenience.
BRIC (South Africa joined later) was initially coined as a description of quickly emerging economies by a Goldman Sachs economist. Since then it’s become an actual trading block that coordinates on economic policy. It’s very obviously dominated by China but the other members see advantage in joining a club that’s not obviously dominated by the US.
The combined GDP of BRICS nations now exceeds the combined GDP of the G20. If it’s a joke, it’s a pretty successful one.
It kinda looks like your arguing that voting doesn’t work.
Yes and emergent behavior goes both ways. Organizations have many properties that the individuals they’re made up of don’t have and they lack many properties that individuals have. Organizations don’t have feelings. Even in the rare cases when the feelings of the people in those organizations are homogeneous, the organizations almost never manifest those feelings without significant alterations.
Are you seriously comparing Joe Rogan with NATO strategists?
There’s a bit more to it than that.
NATO is a strategic alliance lead by the US. NATO doesn’t have any feelings and isn’t pleased or displeased about anything. Instead it generally does whatever is the US believes is most strategically advantageous.
Those strategist are typically smart people who listen to all kinds of things. They’re definitely careful about what they say though and won’t go around promoting information they don’t want suppressed.
China knows that the US has a lot of economic leverage. They’ve been working very hard to change that and a lot of those efforts have flown under the radar.
BRI is pretty obvious and it’s seen as one of the major reason the ASEAN countries are pivoting towards China. But consider the whole South China Sea issue. Everyone frames it as a contest over sea resources and few people consider the strait of Malacca. It’s a potential choke point for all trade west of Southeast Asia. While China is working to be able to defend that they’re also working with Thailand to build a canal that would bypass the straight of Malacca all together. All of that is primarily to reduce US leverage and those initiatives tend to work more often than they fail.
US is by far it’s largest customer
That’s true and there’s also more to it.
The US is China’s largest single trading partner but China has many many trading partners.
May nations now trade or at least negotiate in blocks. Both ASEAN and the UE, as blocks, do more trade with China than the US does. When it comes to individual nations the US isn’t as far ahead as it might seem. Russia, Vietnam and Taiwan together trade more with China than the US does, despite having a combined GDP that’s a tiny fraction of the US.
The key issue is that China has been working really hard to make itself less dependent on the US. They still have a way to go but they’re much less vulnerable than they were a few years ago.
I think that still boils down to attrition and relative size.
From what I’ve seen. Russia has only pulled small numbers of troops out of other theaters to reinforce Kursk. They’ve had an ongoing assault on Avdiivka and they don’t seem to have pulled enough troops out of there to slow down the assault.
The impact, both the severity of the impact and the duration of the impact is likely to hinge on how deep Russias reserves are and their overall production capacity. As near as I can tell, they have both in spades.
From what I’ve seen on Russian industrial production they don’t really care too much if all of Kursk were destroyed. It’s not a strategic location (I think) and all the human and material resources can be easily and quickly replaced.
That obviously involves a lot of guesswork on my part. That’s why I’m wondering if someone with expertise just knows the answers to these kinds of questions (and would hopefully also provide sources).
If that’s the case then Ukraine would need to repeat the Kursk invasion a lot before it made a difference.
Trying to out attrit an opponent with many times the population and GDP is a pretty tall order.
I’m trying to differentiate between things we might like and things that are actually likely.
That makes sense. I’d have questions about all of those too
a) be intended to divide Russian attention and spread their forces out Do we know if that’s happening? Russia has a lot of people and equipment and it’s not obvious to me that they need to pull many resources from other fronts to reinforce Kursk.
b) be used in negotiation and applying domestic pressure to Putin That would make sense too. As long as Ukraine is still holding that territory when those negotiations are going on. Are there any estimates on when those negotiations could happen and if Ukraine will still be in control of Kursk by then?
c) provide a greater buffer for air-defense to counter inbound artillery and missiles
That true but only in the areas directly near Kursk. Is it likely that this can be repeated along the rest of the battle lines?
Your intuition on what Ukraine is hoping to achieve seems reasonable but I don’t know if it’s likely to work out that way.
The whole thing makes me think back to the “Ukrainian counteroffensive” from last year. At the time, US advisors were telling them to do a fast combined arms assault on some place like Mariupol, instead of dithering around, letting the Russians build a ton of defenses and then smashing all the fancy US equipment against said defenses. This assault seems almost like what that counteroffensive should have been. I say “almost” because I’m puzzled about the target. Controlling Mariupol would have cut off the entire western half of the Russian assault. They’d have no supplies and nowhere to run to besides going for a swim. Kursk? The benefits are less obvious.
defcon warning system forums
I’ll check them out. I’m curious why you wouldn’t want to link to them. Do they do something bad?
I’ve been looking for some sort of analysis of this Kursk incursion but have come up empty handed. I’m looking for something along the lines of Markus Reisner’s analyses.
In particular, I’m wondering what the likely paths are to altering the course of the war.
How likely is it that Ukraine will be able to hold this territory? Will they be able to use it as a staging area to launch additional attacks?
Is it likely to alter the artillery equation? Russia currently fires 3-5 times as many artillery shells as Ukraine does. Does this do something like limiting their production rates or their ability to deliver ordinance to the front lines?
Is it likely that Ukraine killed or captured enough Russian troops to impact the broader war?
A phrase like, “That figure is almost as much territory as Russia has seized in Ukraine this year.” kind of implies that there has been a shift in the momentum of the war and that we can expect such announcements more regularly going forward. Is that actually likely?
My pessimistic guess is that this was a brilliant tactical move that will ultimately get steamrolled by Russia’s sheer mass, but I’d love to read an analysis from someone with more expertise.
Do you consider yourself these people’s friend?
If you’re completely disinterested in their milestones, that sounds more like an acquaintance.
But to your question, yes. I actually care about these things for acquaintances and random people too. There are limits to how much I care but it’s not zero.