We are told that we are in a state of preparing for war. When we will start restricting luxury items, unnecessary private jet travel, energy waste in crypto-currencies, etc.?
Because it seems that for being so obsessed to be prepared for war the only ones affected are the working class. The rich are just wasting resources away like if there was no tomorrow.
I just see austerity 2.0 to cut citizens rights, cut services to the working class and transfer as much wealth and power to the super-rich as possible.
I am all for Europe being prepared for war. That is a necessity. So, I am all for better health care, better education, less dependency on foreign gas and oil, better funding for goverment programs ... real measures to be prepare for the worst and less bending over to rich foreign interests.
The only thing we can do is refuse to participate.
Europe no longer needs its people, our governments have demonstrated clearly that the average person is irrelevant and replaceable. Our industries have been sold off and outsourced, we no longer make anything except spreadsheets to enable globalists and asset stripping private equity parasites. Our history and diversity has been deemed non-sacrosanct, if some other country in the world can provide infinite cheaper labour then they are invited to replace us.
In a decade there will be no jobs even for the Uber imported class - we will all just be a burden on the super-rich who want to enjoy the European land in peace without so many people. Do not let them have this. Refuse to fight.
I fully understand not standing behind politicians and the likes. But I don’t get this stance. If the Russians come, you would hand over the country to them? And then what, emigrate?
I mean, fighting to protect the people of a country is also a thing, it doesn’t have to be for the politicians.
Invasions have historically destroyed elites that haven't or can't flee.
Which means business/scientific/... elites that see things coming far enough out are fine, or get out with a large loss. And yes, I'm sure there's the occasional one that's really smart that gets out with a small profit, but I'm sure a large loss is the more normal experience.
Political elites, which is the large majority: people who are rich because they have a role in government, directly or indirectly are fucked.
Don't know about cryptocurrencies, but private jets are a powerful symbol, and them not being the first thing paused when in an oil shortage sends a strong message to the rest of the population.
> I am all for Europe being prepared for war. That is a necessity.
Why? Name one scenario where EU needs a bigger army and masses of barely-trained conscripts.
If you say "Ukraine loses", why not spend all effort on helping Ukraine instead?
> So, I am all for better health care, better education, less dependency on foreign gas and oil, better funding for goverment programs ...
You do realize that preparing for war is insanely expensive and can only be funded by cutting all those other nice things? Also, what do we need education for if we actually expect many people to die in World War style ground warfare?
How about: Let's build some nukes, spend the rest of the money on Ukraine support, and forget about ground war conscription lunacy?
> If you say "Ukraine loses", why not spend all the effort into helping Ukraine instead?
It can't be allowed to cost any real amount of money. In case you're about to say that's a contradiction with Ukraine support: 96% of all EU support to Ukraine is a loan that has to be repaid (and the "90 billion" package will be that, as well). If Ukraine wins, the current tally is that 15% of all Ukrainian tax will go to, well, effectively Germany. Still better than living under Putin, I get it, but ...
As for Germany's own wars: the German state sees Germans as both expendable and cheap. As you point out, these wars are pretty much planned in at the moment.
Oh and making these weapons, whether that means nukes or the other weapon that has worked really well in Ukraine (killbots), is going to be massively unpopular. (What are these killbots? Think the terminator T-1-8, except with realistic tires that will actually work and only one gun [1], or in the air [2]) Especially once AI is built into them.
Why? Every soldier, every person, that sees those drones is going to realize exactly what the German state wants of them: the areal ones are suicide drones: the German military will use the Zap Brannigan technique. After all, 1 German corpse = 1 disabled drone. Or get shredded to pieces by an AI machine gun that never misses in hopes that your corpse ties up it's tires afterwards. Odds are not good, so there will need to be a lot of you doing that.
I'm sure they'll give you a gun and be very happy if you disable a drone with a shot instead of your corpse, but the only guns that kind of work are shotgun net-launchers, which we all know right now: the military will never approve.
Don't worry, I'm sure the higher ups will get medals. Not for actually going on the frontlines.
Oh and the news from the frontline: those drones themselves are pretty good against bullets. Even hitting them does not often disable them. And hitting them is very hard to begin with.
Oh and, of course, it's not "the state" demanding this, it's the current German population not wanting to give up, well anything, to improve the future. By the way: the only thing worth discussing to be (partially) given up, really, is social security (41% of expenditures). The next 4 biggest costs are healthcare (16%), government jobs (17%), transportation (12%) and (least important) education (9%).
So it boils down to the same thing it always boils down to: the population must work more. In the sense that a decent chunk of Germans who either don't work, or work in government, must get themselves private sector jobs.
Alternatives? Well ... I have someone here: Wait! Comrade! Just say No! We'll just eat the rich instead! As for your question which party put Putin in power ... we don't talk about that. How rich is Putin? We don't talk about that either. Aren't most of the German rich "clients" of the state even now? And won't state control make that worse? I said: We DO NOT talk about that! Eat the rich! And don't build defenses at all! That's the solution.
> 96% of all EU support to Ukraine is a loan that has to be repaid (and the "90 billion" package will be that, as well). If Ukraine wins, the current tally is that 15% of all Ukrainian tax will go to, well, effectively Germany.
EU expects to use Russia's frozen assets as collateral/reparations for repayment when Russia gives up/Ukraine wins. Everybody knows that Ukraine cannot repay themselves.
> whether that means nukes or the other weapon that has worked really well in Ukraine (killbots), is going to be massively unpopular.
This thinking dominates the current discourse and it is shockingly stupid. Making nukes and drones is bad and unpopular, alright.
So instead we "prepare for war" and "get ready for hard times" because it sounds so brave, so heroic and abstract. Politicians are suddenly allowed to spend staggering amounts of money on defense companies - people love it - and nobody wants to ask what exactly is the scenario we are preparing for.
> Because it seems that for being so obsessed to be prepared for war the only ones affected are the working class. The rich are just wasting resources away like if there was no tomorrow
In the US it was very fascinating to see the reaction to the Iran conflict. A bunch of geriatric pedowood actors and actual Epstein associates were seething that young men in general across the political spectrum who do not want to die in a pointless war of nothing in some god forsaken desert again.
I can recommend you to visit Michaelibad in Munich and check how the new reality in Germany looks like. Spoiler: it’s different than in movies from 90s.
If it was not enough of sight seeing in modern Germany next destination would be Alter Botanischer Garten in Munich. Fun fact: it was absolutely normal place two decades ago. I used to have a beer there since it’s close to the university.
you really did not explain what changed, what happens now there that isn't "normal" anymore. Treating you as a racist is the easy part, the problem is how you, as a racist, are treating people.
I guess we're living in two different areas of Europe. And regarding the last point:
> And the EU regime plans what? To send European military age men to die in a faraway foreign country fighting for foreign interests while their homes and way of living are under attack.
First of all, there is no "EU regime", only countries threatened by Russia daily, which decided they need to increase their defence spending to deter Russia. Europe collectively decided NOT to send people "to die in a faraway foreign country fighting for foreign interests" in spite of Trump's pressure to do so.
Stopping Ransomware is trivial if governments knew where the money goes. But cryptocurrencies and lax capital control pushed by the uber-rich makes it impossible.
The technology is there and it is used to track the average citizens every move. But when it comes to rich people then the money goes and comes without control (and without taxation).
Cryptocurrencies are a great solution to enable criminal activity. Their only use and highly appreciated by terrorists, criminals and dictatorial governments around the world.
It is far from trivial. What are you going to do if the money goes to an enemy country?
And while cryptocurrency are certainly popular with criminals, it is far from the only option for hiding transactions. As for the technology, if it exists, it is not very effective. The shadow economy is going strong even among average citizens, from drug trade to babysitting.
If governments can't stop even the most trivial kind of unreported work in their own country, how to you expect them to stop well organized international gangs, sometimes backed by nation states.
> It is far from trivial. What are you going to do if the money goes to an enemy country?
Who send it?
> And while cryptocurrency are certainly popular with criminals, it is far from the only option for hiding transactions.
Start by removing the cryptocurrency option, that's an easy win. Go after other options afterwards. Removing cryptocurrencies is not going to stop all the crime but it will stop a lot of it and push criminals to more risky and easy to trace ways of getting money.
> how to you expect them to stop well organized international gangs, sometimes backed by nation states.
Removing their financing like cryptocurrencies. All that you say is that crime is impossible to stop. Bollocks. Start by banning Bitcoin and other crypto-crime-enablers and continue from there.
You gave zero arguments to why cryptocurrencies should not be banned.
What cracks me up is how much crypto is emblematic of Libertarianism. Sounds promising if you think about it a superficially, but is obviously bad if you actually think about it in any real world terms.
And not just abstractly - they both fall apart for the exact same reasons. Libertarianism is essentially "But, what if we scaled up the failures of crypto to all of society?"
Europe in general have great software engineers. What it lacks is investment. To see the goverment serving its own country instead of foreign billionaire interests is good change of pace.
And Linux development and adoption helps everybody not just France. A win win.
Unregulated capitalism descents into scams and fraud. Why better your products and services when it is possible to buy competitors, increase prices and lie?
We need judges and policymakers that punish harshly this behavior and force companies to compete in quality and price instead of lies and competition elimination.
No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output.
> Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between what it thinks is the reality and what is.
Confabulation has to do with degradation of biological processes and information storage.
There is no equivalent in a LLM. Once the data is recorded it will be recalled exactly the same up to the bit. A LLM representation is immutable. You can download a model a 1000 times, run it for 10 years, etc. and the data is the same. The closes that you get is if you store the data in a faulty disk, but that is not why LLMs output is so awful, that would be a trivial problem to solve with current technology. (Like having a RAID and a few checksums).
I don't even think they bullshit, since that requires conscious effort that they do not an cannot possess. They just simply interpret things incorrectly sometimes, like any of us meatbags.
They make incorrect predictions of text to respond to prompts.
The neat thing about LLMs is they are very general models that can be used for lots of different things. The downside is they often make incorrect predictions, and what's worse, it isn't even very predictable to know when they make incorrect predictions.
I think this is leaning on the "lies are when you tell falsehoods on purpose; bullshit is when you simply don't care at all whether what you're saying is true" definition of bullshit. Cf. On Bullshit.
So, they can't lie, but they can (and, in fact, exclusively do) bullshit.
The correct answer in that the U and _ in the mdstat output cannot be mapped the the rest of the output by either position or indexes in square brackets, so you can't tell the exact nature of the failure from the mdstat output alone (for the record, the failed disk was sda).
So all of the "analysis" was bullshit, including "it's probably multiple partitions from multiple drives". But there are so many juicy numbered and indexed bits of info to pattern match on!
Notice how for the followup question it "thought" for 4 minutes, going in circles trying to make essentially random ordering to make some sort of ordered sense., and then bullshited its way to "it is sdb"
> No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output.
Isn't "caring" a necessary pre-requisite for bullshitting? One either bullshits because they care, or don't care, about the context.
They're presumably referring to the Harry Frankfurt definition of bullshit: "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false."
The bullshitter does have an objective in mind however. There is some ultimate purpose to his bullshitting. LLMs don't even have that. They just spew words.
> Why are corporations allowed to do with impunity what could land even a teenager years in prison? Is there no rule of law anymore?
Those laws are intended to protect corporations. If corporations are the ones doing the scraping, it doesn't make sense for the same laws to affect them.
So, I knew Aaron and I definitely would not presume to predict what he would have thought, but I’d point out there is a sizeable state space where he should never have been prosecuted, and scraping by others including large commercial companies should not prosecutable on the same grounds.
I repeat what Aaron’s friends and lawyers said at the time: we were going to fight that case, and we were going to win.
It's a bit more like a physical business with a "public welcome" policy like a coffee shop going viral and then having tens of thousands of people walking in and taking pictures but not buying coffee. It's disruptive, but not illegal.
Acme.com is welcome to require authentication for all pages but their home page, which would quickly cause the traffic to drop. They don't want to do this - like the coffee shop, they want to be open to public, and for good reasons.
Sometimes the use profile changes dramatically in a short time. 15 years ago, Netflix created the video streaming market and shared bandwidth capacity that had been excessive before wasn't enough. 15 years before that, Google did the same thing when they created search and started driving tremendous traffic to text based websites which had spread through word of mouth before.
Turns out the micro transaction people probably had the right idea.
I've had to deploy a combination of Cloudflare's bot protection and anubis on over 200 domains across 8 different hosting environments in the last 2 months. I have small business clients that couldn't access their sales and support platforms because their websites that normally see tens of thousands of unique sessions per day are suddenly seeing over a million in an hour.
Anthropic and OpenAI were responsible for over 70% of that traffic.
> waiting on the govt to do something is a path of failure
To keep the goverment accountable is a duty of every citizen and the only way to have a functioning society. The failure is to let the goverment be arbitrary and cater to the powerful instead of following the rule of law and applying it equally at all levels.
Have you not been paying attention to the news for the past few years?
No, there isn't. If there were, Trump would be in prison, not the Oval Office. And he and the Republican Party have deliberately fostered this environment of corruption and rule-by-wealth so that they can gain more power and even more wealth.
And now they are also backing the AI zealots, and techbros more generally, to ensure that they can do whatever the hell they want, damn the consequences to the rest of the world.
Search engines appear to care more about being good "Netizens". It's not like GoogleBot never crashed a site, but it's rare. Search engine bots check if they need to back off for a bit, they check etags, notices if page changes infrequently and slow down their crawler frequency.
If you train an LLM, it's not like you keep a copy of every page around, so there's no point to check if you need to re-scrape a page, you do, because you store nothing.
Personally I think people would be pretty indifferent to the new generation of scrapers, AI or other types, if they at least behaved and slowed down if they notice a site struggling. If they had the slightest bit of respect for others on the web, this wouldn't be an issue.
Most offer ways to opt out, some don’t. Scraping somebody’s website might be annoying or problematic traffic-wise but that’s a far (very far) step removed from saying scrapers should be criminalised. The latter statement is outright laughable.
Because the law deals with intent. The intent for a 12 year old skiddie with a ddos box is to harm someone else's internet. the intent of big scrapers is to collect data. if you want to make the latter illegal then vote for that instead of loading it with the normative baggage of the former.
It's the same problem as why Occupy Wallstreet fell apart: bunch of losers who don't understand the system screech about the system. because they don't understand it, they can't offer any meaningful dialogue about how to fix it beyond screeching.
> Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.
Yes. It was nice when corporate taxes were high, xenophobia was seen as something bad, and movies could focus on smaller problems satire.
I hope that we go back to the socialist era of the USA with unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires. Movies could just be silly again.
Was that supposed to trigger me? Not from there, but I'm in favor of "unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires" and higher corporate taxes!
But also I don't think movies aren't silly because they deal with all the "big problems". After all they didn't have a problem making silly movies in eras with far worse problems, social and economic. And they could make hella fun movies on heavy topics just fine (Blazing Saddles and racism for example, or MASH and the Vietnam war - even if nominally about Korea).
Modern comedies aren't silly or fun, not because times are troubled, but because they're written as shallow moralizing lectures. Any "caring" is performative. They're also walking on eggshells, and are too polite to have any edge. And then there's the derivative reboots and remakes, which many of them are.
IBM has more revenue than Oracle even if we hear way less about it. 5 times smaller than Apple, thou. It also has more employees than Microsoft or Alphabet. But it has tighter profit margins than other tech companies.
IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.
Oracle/TSMC/SpaceX isn’t in consumer products/services, but they are heard about.
IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM.
Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers due to the goodwill from their brand’s legacy, so being a dying rent seeking business as opposed to a growing innovative business was the assumption I had.
It’s a very different company post the PwC purchase. They have around 1/3 of the revenue from consulting which tends to push the valuation down due to its relative low margin when compared to software. This also inflates the number of employees.
Because it seems that for being so obsessed to be prepared for war the only ones affected are the working class. The rich are just wasting resources away like if there was no tomorrow.
I just see austerity 2.0 to cut citizens rights, cut services to the working class and transfer as much wealth and power to the super-rich as possible.
I am all for Europe being prepared for war. That is a necessity. So, I am all for better health care, better education, less dependency on foreign gas and oil, better funding for goverment programs ... real measures to be prepare for the worst and less bending over to rich foreign interests.
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