I think you missed the bigger picture here. It’s that China has their own stack now, soon others will follow. It’s not about putting up the highest numbers, it’s about putting up the highest ROI. To them, this is it. Qwen too but being able to compete with today’s models means they are closer to competing with tomorrow’s.
At this scale, it's purely quality. The better the model, the faster the advancements. If using a model half as smart as the best made us half as productive, people would pretty much all be using the current quantized models that can run on a decent laptop. The difference between Opus xHigh and Gemma4 is very different (at least in my job).
As someone who identifies as autistic, I learned to smile and just listen. I’ll ask questions and try and put my little anecdotes in but for the most part I just let other people talk. Works reasonably well. I usually run afoul when the situation is serious and I show up with my smile.
As someone who is not autistic, just tends towards very socially awkward, this is what I do as well. Active listening is a skill I developed by accident out of not having much to contribute to most conversations. As time went on, I saw that most people appreciate just being heard and worked on it more deliberately.
It's not all puppies and rainbows of course, because some people can't hold a conversation without being led through it by the hand, which is exhausting. And others think everyone else is always so fascinated with what they have to say that they never stop for you to get a word in edgewise.
But, active listening accounts for the majority of my social skills, for better or worse.
Instructions unclear. I don't usually smile at puppies, I point them out to my wife. She does the smiling for us. What if she isn't there? Who will do the smiling?
I don't know about you, but things that make me happy and things that automatically make me bare my teeth at them are not the same things. Deal with it.
Ah yes, the administration’s love of Axis of Allies, or is it allies of axis? They don’t know, they got distracted by the mustaches and the desire to conquer the world.
You do realize that the Axis (Nazi Germany, Japan) were attacking everyone with the explicitly stated goal of conquering the world (and subjecting it to the holocaust, we might add), and US stopped them, conquered Europe, North Africa, half the Pacific, and nothing has been able to stop the US military since.
And the US ... retreated.
We might add, the Soviets, the other axis, did not retreat. China did not retreat. Both of them started killing people to keep their conquests.
I mean, there's no shortage of stuff that the US did wrong and US made mistakes. This was not one of them.
The US did not retreat. We fought multiple wars to maintain our power and influence. We toppled multiple regimes to maintain puppet governments. Very much the same as the USSR and China have done.
Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, etc.
US conquest was quiet similar to British conquest. They didn't make their conquered people citizens (that'd make things tricky for exploitation) so instead they make sure the "democracies" they spread elected the right leaders who just so happen to align with US interests.
There's a reason the US has military bases across the globe. It's not because they've retreated from their subservient states.
> The US did not retreat. We fought multiple wars to maintain our power and influence. We toppled multiple regimes to maintain puppet governments. Very much the same as the USSR and China have done.
As much as I am critical of the US, until now the US did behave very differently from other superpowers. Consider the end of WWII. The US did not inflict reparations on the vanquished nations but rather, invested huge sums in their rebuilding, in the process making stalwart allies of them. These were not puppet governments, they became thriving democracies.
This is not to excuse the many bad things the US has done in Latin America, Vietnam, etc. But there is really no comparison between US behaviour and that of the USSR (or of colonial European countries, for that matter). People in Soviet-controlled East Germany were quite keen to go to the west and did not perceive the presence of US military bases there as evidence of American totalitarianism.
That, of course, has changed and now America is seen as a predatory hegemon. But that has not always been true.
The US did not keep bases in all of West Germany though.
There were different sectors. The US had essentially the South. There were also the British sector and French. The Soviets were the fourth sector but we all know how that one was quite different from the other three.
While the French and British have mostly left, the US stayed. Though to be fair even the British still do have some bases it seems as NATO troups. But no more large garrison in many larger cities.
The US on the other hand is still there with much larger force. Like think back to "Air Force One" (the movie with Harrison Ford) which used Ramstein Airbase in the movie (though they didn't actually film there) and that airbase has come up in the Iran conflict as a conflict of its own. Meaning Germany didn't want the US to use it as a hub for US operations (supply logistics) for the Iran war.
> The US on the other hand is still there with much larger force.
To provide for European security! That’s the deal in terms of Europe and NATO and also specifically to handle Germany. The idea was that America would provide security to Europe including the nuclear umbrella, and one benefit - among many others - was that Germany would not need to have a powerful military.
Can you perhaps guess why people might be concerned about a heavily armed Germany in the postwar period? Those same concerns are bubbling up in European capitals right now, as Germany rearms due to the loss of the US as a reliable partner.
And yes I definitely remember Colbert quite some time ago quipping about exactly that (paraphrased from memory): US no longer reliable NATO partner and nuclear deterrent. So Europe needs to step up. Let's have Germany have nukes. What could possibly go wrong!
The obviously funny thing being, that the US has, for a long time and Trump doubled down, asked Europe including Germany to spend more on military. And the "moderate forces" in Germany are not an issue in that regard. Those are the ones not wanting Trump to use Ramstein airbase in a war he started.
But would you want the AfD to come to power and wield those ramped up, potentially now nuclear, forces? The party that was ruled as "definitely extremist right wing aka neo nazi" in some federal states by Germany's own "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution". Oh and also was that not the party a certain Elon Musk and Trump were trying to prop up? Which is doubly funny because of the AfD's alleged ties to Putin (sometimes more than alleged).
> But would you want the AfD to come to power and wield those ramped up, potentially now nuclear, forces?
Totally! That’s what makes the situation doubly maddening. It would be one thing if these actions were bad for the world and good for the US. But they’re bad for the US too!
I forget who it was that said this, and I’m sure my paraphrasing is bad, but I listened or read something I found chilling. It was something like, ordinary Americans are totally unprepared for the level of danger they will experience over the coming decades.
The only reason Trump is able to destroy global institutions so easily is because Americans take their security for granted. But that security is the result of institutions developed in the aftermath of an utterly devastating war. Now those institutions are damaged and America’s friends are alienated, right when they are most needed to deal with China, Russia, AI, drones, cyber, nuclear, climate…talk about bad timing.
> As much as I am critical of the US, until now the US did behave very differently from other superpowers. Consider the end of WWII. The US did not inflict reparations on the vanquished nations but rather, invested huge sums in their rebuilding, in the process making stalwart allies of them.
That is also how Rome routinely dealt with the border tribes that it defeated. It's not a new idea. That's just what superpowers do.
Spain, France, the entire iron curtain following 1992 dissolution of USSR, Taiwan, Phillipines, Costa Rica, Panama ... and speaking of central America, Venezuela isn't doing so bad either. Perhaps more expansive lists could be produced once the definitions of "meddled with" and "treated well" are more refined.
I generally take the word "conquest" to mean some outside force coming in and taking over. That didn't happen in either Vietnam or Korea. You could argue that the USSR used conquest to take over territories for the soviet union. However, that's not something really arguable about Vietnam or Korea. Vietnam, in particular, was the native population overthrowing their conquerors, the french, and then deciding they wanted to be communists. They got support from both the USSR and China, but they weren't ultimately under the umbrella of either regime.
Now, I'd agree that Vietnam and Korea both had civil wars supercharged by the US, China, and Russia. But I disagree that these were wars where the US was stopping conquest. We see that in the modern state of Vietnam and North Korea. Vietnam, funnily, became a closer ally to the US than China after the war.
Cuba is very much the same way. It wasn't conquered by an outside force. Yet they did ally with the USSR once the dust settled. They were still an independent nation from the USSR.
The Communists. Would you rather live in North or South Korea?
Vietnam is interesting in that they're still politically authoritarian but willing to be more economically open; see also China. (Just don't say the wrong thing about the wrong people.)
Today obviously the South. In 1950, probably the North. Throughout the Korean war, it's a wash. The US obliterated the north, but the south was completely insane towards their own civilian population. The ROK was not a "nice" government to live under during the korean war.
If you lived in the north there was a good possibility that you were getting bombed. It was best to live near china.
If you live in the south, there was a good chance you would be conscripted and sent to the meat grinder as a man.
The subsequent cease fire, the south has rebuilt and become the better place to live. The north has mostly struggled due to international sanctions. They have never fully recovered.
"The Communist" were a faction in a civil war, that's not an invasion. And the split in both cases (Vietnam and Korea) was recent and artificial, in the sense of no tradition of there being two countries. It wasn't one country invading another country, but two halves engaged in a civil war.
Where one wants to live is irrelevant. It wasn't about stopping an invasion, which was the initial claim. The US was meddling.
> Vietnam and Korea were technically wars to stop conquest, no?
No.
For example, the US got involved in Vietnam to help the colonizer (France) stop an independence movement. Yes, because they feared the resulting Vietnam may become communist and USSR aligned (something they helped happen, since Ho Chi Minh quite admired the US and expected them to help him at first), but even if this was the case, it's still not about stopping an invasion, because commie Vietnamese are still Vietnamese.
> Russia has 12, mostly in former Soviet countries. China has 3
To be fair, you're comparing land powers–that tend to annex their holdings–with a maritime power, who tend to trade with and maintain favourable ports at their conquests/allies. So yeah, China doesn't have any foreign bases in Tibet. But that's because it annexed it in the 1950s.
Put together, America obviously has a larger military than China or Russia. But before Russia became a rump, the Soviet Union could marshall military resources comparable to–and for one decade, in excess of–those of the United States for much of the post-War era.
How many "foreign" bases did Russia have a few years after WW2, before revolutions kicked them out? Before Russia annexed countries and destroyed the populations?
Because that's, of course, the real question.
It's literally thousands.
You need thousands of military bases if you're going to do "thought police". Because that's what you'll never read here. Russia HAD a (military) thought police. It was Putin's job when he got started, by the way.
To be fair, if you stand in the middle of The Netherlands, 260km in any direction and you end up outside of the country. Which base are you talking about?
Was that on a country that went on a genocidal rampage just before and lost the war after killing millions all around Europe, which was decided to be divided in several parts, of which USSR got to control one, and which still developed into an independent country less than a decade later?
Yes, but you're leaving out the other 9 countries the Soviet Union occupied, and immediately started killing the population to keep their conquests: Poland, Austria’s Soviet zone, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
By contrast, the US retreated. And also didn't start killing any population.
"Killing their population" as in executing some Nazi collaborators, of which there was no shortage in all, down to full cooperation? Like the ones involved in the Axis alliance and in the eastern front offensives that caused the deaths of millions of their own people?
>And also didn't start killing any population.
Yes, just Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and anybody who leaned national sovereignity/left in the Latin America and later the middle east.
> Very much the same as the USSR and China have done.
The expressed goal of Communism (USSR, later China) was to spread its ideology to the entire world. The US chose at its goal the containment of Communism:
This is what drove Korea, Vietnam, Cuba/Castro, and many other countries with left-leaning governments. In many cases this ended up with the US supporting the right-wing people, e.g.:
> There's a reason the US has military bases across the globe. It's not because they've retreated from their subservient states.
Yes, containment and power projection to keep the sea lanes open for trade (which benefits the US financially and life-style-wise, but also benefits countries who export things, to the US and other places):
If you don't think having peaceful sea lanes is useful, see Houthis/Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz. What we're seeing with Trump's worldview is a return to how things tended to be earlier in history:
US did not stopped Axis alone, Allies did. Even in Pacific Soviet participation was very important in defeating Japan.
And the US did not retreat, it kept its military all across Europe (and the world), brought its nuclear weapons to Europe (not for the Europe, but for the US to be used with Europe as a launching pad).
The Allies stopped them. The US was one of the major contributors, but they were far from alone. The Soviets, Britain, Canada, India, Poland, France, Netherlands, Kenya, etc etc all contributed to various extents. The Indian army was one of the biggest by number of men. The Poles and French were crucial in setting the ground work for the British decrypting Enigma, alongside their purely military contributions.
Japan did not take part in the Holocaust. Not the goal of Germany nor Italy was the holocaust. Their objective was not to conquer the world. They were empire builders, plain and simple, and they were trying to expand their trade networks, like Britain had done and monopolized. They took over each European state and replaced its leadership with one that benefitted themselves. Their objective was policy frameworks for the purpose of trading. The holocaust was a later addon (1940).
No one calls the japanese persecution of the Chinese a holocaust.
For generalplan ost, “The plan, prepared in the years 1939–1942, was part of Adolf Hitler's and the Nazi movement's Lebensraum policy and a fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten” which still makes it a later development.
They didn’t even retreat from places like Italy because... the communists might be successful. So the CIA backed fascists to sabotage them.
And the US ... retreated. harumph And interferred, and supported right-wing militias, and invaded countries by themselves, and supported coups, and so on.
Most simplistic would be _Divide and Conquer_ (Axis) vs _United we stand, divided we fall_ (Allie). This administration is going down the divide and conquer path.
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H Kater. [0] The current US administration has numerous similarities to 1930s Germany. The way they support banning books and the treatment of the LGBT+ community. Working to take over media organizations with proponent operatives, financial corruption, and _please the leader_ are also present in both. There are more ... read the book for them.
And a lot of dissimilarities, like the lack of mass executions of the disabled for example or a missing mass extermination plan of millions, maybe also kidnapping teenagers from the street and shipping them to brothels for soldiers, shooting babies? but apart from that exactly the same
Are you looking for and only accepting isomorphism between the two?
There are no governing bodies in history that have ever been isomorphic. Only similarities exist between them. Japan never assisted with extermination of Jews and they are in the Venn diagram of Axis and authoritarianism.
I have high confidence that Adolf Hilter, Bentio Mussolini, and Emperor Shōwa never were part of a child trafficking ring that catered to the wealthy and assisted them with raping and torturing of youths on a privately owned island. There are simulates though with _human trafficking_ between all parties.
Didn't Donald Trump state that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country? Didn't Adolf Hitler say Jews are poisoning the blood of the country? Aren't both simulates?
There never can be two states that are exactly the same; from policies to events. Iceland and Germany are classified as democratic countries and they have dissimilarities.
> Didn't Donald Trump state that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country? Didn't Adolf Hitler say Jews are poisoning the blood of the country? Aren't both simulates?
That is actually something that is pretty popular with anti-immigration rhetoric before and after Hitler, although there are probably over a hundred such politicians who used that rhetoric, not many have killed millions, that's hardly enough to think you have found Nazism.
> I have high confidence that Adolf Hilter, Bentio Mussolini, and Emperor Shōwa never were part of a child trafficking ring that catered to the wealthy and assisted them with raping and torturing of youths on a privately owned island. There are simulates though with _human trafficking_ between all parties.
As far as I can tell apart from guilt by association, there is no definitive proof about Trump being part of their pedophile ring, nothing that can't be said about Clinton, Chomsky or Gates or many others for example. The relation to Hitler in any case is no relation at all, so this segue is confusing
In any case, this examples are redundant as similarities are not enough to establish a category, as I could establish similarities between Hitler and Gandhi (Vegetarianism, cult following, theatrical rhetorics and meta-narratives) to say Hitler is actually a pacifist. That's of course absurd.
Ignoring the Nazi anti-morality and national scale paranoid schizophrenia which are major missing points, the rapid takeover of a single party of the state, destroying the parliament, making the Executive into the law, creating a party's army and using state violence against political enemies are some of the hallmarks of the beginning of third reich germany. This is simply not Trump USA after 6 years, not close.
I am sorry but these false comparisons are simply a social media convention of getting engagement by turning the volume to 11, and nothing works better than misusing categories through superficial comparisons
My point was that this administration seems to like the axis plan more than the original US/Allied plan. I'm fully aware of which side was which. Tell that to Hegseth and Miller.
This. I signed up for 5x max for a month to push it and instead it pushed back. I cancelled my subscription. It either half-assed the implementation or began parroting back “You’re right!” instead of doing what it’s asked to do. On one occasion it flat out said it couldn’t complete the task even though I had MCP and skills setup to help it, it still refused. Not a safety check but a “I’m unable to figure out what to do” kind of way.
Claude has no such limitations apart from their actual limits…
I have a funny/annoying thing with Claude Desktop where i ask it to write a summary of a spec discussion to a file and it goes ”I don’t have the tools to do that, I am Claude.ai, a web service” or something such. So now I start every session with ”You are Claude Desktop”. I would have thought it knew that. :)
If that’s how you feel then you might have an unreasonable standard. People you might consider to be living in abject poverty might not be so downtrodden as you suspect. Even though there are extreme downsides and externalities to being relatively poor, being lonely is not one of them.
> People you might consider to be living in abject poverty might not be so downtrodden as you suspect
This is true, until they have a medical emergency that breaks them because they can't afford it, or the furnace in their house breaks, or they are reno-evicted by their landlord, or their car breaks down or whatever
You're broadly right that money doesn't exactly buy happiness, but it does prevent or mitigate a lot of unhappiness
that's our future... with AI. Engineers that don't know the difference between client-side convenience and server-side injection, how to configure `php.ini`, or that no synchronized password manager is safe. While the OAuth scope is `*`, and CORS is what you drink on the weekend.
Can someone explain why people struggle with CORS?
The full strength of the SOP applies by default. CORS is an insecurity feature that relaxes the SOP. Unless you need to relax the SOP, you shouldn't be enabling CORS, meaning you shouldn't be sending an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header at all.
If your front-end at www.example.com makes calls to api.example.com, then it's simple enough to just add www.example.com to CORS.
IME, CORS is pretty straightforward in prod but can be a huge pain in dev environments, so you end up with lots of little hacks to get your dev environments working (and then one of those hacks leaks back into prod and now you have CORS problems in prod).
This. This is a result of not having proper environments and engineering practices in place and so the team or engineer is free to just wing it and add hacks around security best practices because the Security Team (tm) is elsewhere and they never understand the ask. They know PKI and certificates, access card identity, maybe Cisco for their "cyber security" but that's usually where it ends. Yet somehow, they are in charge of CORS and TLS and Sast/Dast scans and everything else that should be baked into the pipelines and process. Resulting in an engineer saying f'it and adding an `if localhost` hack or something. CORS is one example but there are many others in pretty much every area of security. OAuth, CORS, LDAP, Secrets, Hashing, TOTP, you name it. Each has a plethora of packages and libraries that can "do" the thing but it always becomes a hairball mess to the dev because they never understood it to begin with.
That simple prod example isn't where people struggle with CORS. It's during development and I've got assets on Cloudflare and AWS and GCP and localhost:3000 and localhost:8000, and localhost:3001 and then a VM in Hetner at API.example.com because why not, that shit gets complicated and people get confused and lost. I mean, yeah, don't do that, but CORS gets complicated once the project gets enough teams involved.
I’ve found that the best way to deal with this is to add an entry to /etc/hosts for my local machine that fits the pattern for QA environment. Then I run a local reverse proxy with a self signed certificate.
Care to elaborate? I'd agree that the security/availability tradeoff is different, but "not safe" is as nonsensical a blanket statement as "all/only offline/paper-based/... password managers are safe".
reply