brucethemoose

Yeah, the last point is especially interesting. Some reports I've read suggest that Putin is a relative moderate in Russian politics, and there are some figures that would make him look tame without Putin "keeping them in line," so to speak.

This amazes me every time I hear it.

Russian Strategist: “Comrades, NATO has surrounded our homeland with military bases. They are aggressive, needlessly paranoid, using the absurd notion of our aggression as justification. We must not encourage this aggressive expansion. What shall our strategy be?”

Subordinate 1: “Bolster our defenses in kind?”

Subordinate 2: “Seed our economy!”

Subordinate 3: “Create ties with other nations peacefully, to show them a better way than Western aggression, manipulation and coercion.”

Subordinate 4: “Unite with our allies and resist the corrupt west.”

Subordinate 5: Taps chin. “…What if we expend vast resources and hundreds of thousands of young men ‘liberating’ our tiny neighbor, as they aren’t yet in NATO? To, uh…… discourage NATO from expanding?”

The room looks to the young advisor, in dead silence.

Strategist: “Brilliant! Genius! That will certainly discourage the growth of NATO.”

Russia beats neighbor in the face.

Russia: “Stop making me do this, everyone!”

Continues to beat neighbor in the face, who just won’t go down.

Russia : Come on guys, you’re mean! Why are you making me do this!

China, looking on, rubs forehead and shakes their head. “Yes, that is our ally. Yep…” Gazes to a VERY drunk US shooting wildly.

Actually, Chinese are doing a whole lot more innovation than American "AI brains," or at least innovation that we know about. Architectures are getting more and more efficient, instead of US Big Tech's "the same, but bigger, and capture regulators" ethos.

Not that the Chinese labs are saints. They're 100% distilling US labs data. It's somewhat measurable:

https://eqbench.com/creative_writing.html

They're almost certainly using unspecified Chinese govt data too, or at least sharing data between them, given the common quirks and behavior across models and the efficiency for their size. Not to speak of political "gaps" (which US models certainly have too).

Yeah, there’s all sorts of crazy political purity tests on Lemmy, and associated misuse of slurs.

And on Wikipedia:

On one side, my MAGA-adjacent family is starting to question it as “liberal biased”… as they leave Fox News blasting in the background.
On the other, tankies and some different leftist extremist leftists dismiss it as propaganda.

That’s a good sign, to me. Its never been perfect and has problems, but extremists trying to tear its credibility down is a sign of just how valuable it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

And if one points out Wikipedia (while very imperfect, yes) is just Western Propaganda, well, that’s a pretty good indicator, too.

That’s because science literacy is pretty low.

And to be fair, the average person doesn’t need to understand vacuum thermodynamics. The issues is when a few of those “average people” are now billionaires making unilateral decisions, surrounded by yes men and feeds instead of experts informing them of reality.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s a fantasy in billionaire's heads, a self-perpetuating meme, and no one is telling them no. So they’re going to fund it, whether it makes any sense or not.

Reality doesn’t really matter anymore.

It’s not speculation. Nvidia themselves have run experiments with GPUs in orbit, and the issue gets worse with smaller lithography (eg newer chips).

So do all the Microsoft subscriptions they already buy, yet they're extremely popular anyway?

ISW is keeping track of assassinations and bombings, and are calling this "unconfirmed." But they do aggregate several sources:

https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-us-and-israeli-strikes-february-28-2026/

I do wonder what happens next. Does the IRGC take over as a military junta or something? That sounds... unfun.

Businesses will adore this. I can guarantee a lot of us will be forced to use these at work, like Teams and CoPilot, as a further mega deal with Microsoft.

...But honestly, I think "home" buyers who don't really care about PC stuff, aka most people, would pick tablets over this.

Especially for businesses. At work you'll have no choice but to use something like this.

But the point is that Valve could easily be Amazon some day. All these little companies taking their first anticompetitive steps could.

Of course everyone loves them when they’re small, and nice, and growing, until they get so big it’s way too late to do anything about it. But many will still feel loyalty, like they do to Amazon today.

Eh, the context I was thinking of is that they are constantly playing “safety theatre” where it absolutely doesn’t matter. They’ve tried to kill open models and basically capture regulators by misleading or outright lying, for their benefit.

In other words, this is a case of “a broken clock is right sometimes,” and I think they knew Trump will back down.

Afghans use “tribal fundamentalists” and “big fucking mountains”

Its super effective!

Yeah… Microsoft and Google have a list of employees to fire now.

Trump will back off to some extent, to avoid inflaming stock markets (and his Big Tech friends heavily invested in Anthropic tooling).

Anthropic will fire a few people. OpenAI will raise money somehow.

That’s about it.

That’s basically always been the case anyway, except for Gemini for long context, perhaps.

And, of couse, prioritize open models over API. It’s:

Open training models > open weights models > restrictively licensed open models > open weights models over API > Claude/Gemini

Anthropic is self righteous and self serving.

Like, I like local LLMs more than most, and Anthropic models are great at the moment, but don’t mistake Anthropic for having a spine.