No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
Game subthread.
Review of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader in the child comment here. (if putting it like this, let the mods remind me of not doing this)
No_one
2yr ago
What are you looking for? What are you hoping to find?
You can't tolerate corruption like that.
... you think it's normal that Biden bragged about having Ukrainian prosecuted fired for investigating Burisma, the company that was paying off Hunter Biden ?
This is just corruption. In any western European country, that'd cause the government to resign. Ministers there resign over some piddly plagiarism nonsense, or minor oversights. Even in eastern Europe it'd be a major scandal and probably require new elections.
No_one
8d ago
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity!
I see people out there getting absolutely wasted on kratom, acting like lunatics, wasting huge amounts of money on it, not washing, being aggressive, getting in fights. Maybe drugs should be legal for people who are not idiots.
No_one
1yr ago
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
Now you're getting it. People have been talking about how a green service economy with little actual industry isn't actually useful when you need to like, blow stuff up or build it.
when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare
You know, it does takes years to build up big armies and industries. Germany was cheating in 1930s because their entire army was designed around re-expanding. They hired the best, they had WW1 veterans, everyone was trained on things a couple levels above him. And even then it took them like 6 years to build up. In a militaristic regime with relatively high approval rates, plenty of young people and so on.
Look at Biden or von der Leyen. Look at the green energy 20 year shamble.
Not gonna happen. It's late stage regime, the best it can do is suppress political opposition
Russia meanwhile doesn't have enough people to occupy Ukraine. It's not the world-conquering totalitarian state of scare propaganda. If they were, they'd not be hiring Nepalis, but everyone youngish but essential workers would be in the army and it'd be 4 million strong.
They could, if Putin was feeling insane enough try to take over Baltics and maybe (I give this low probability) Russian missile attack could wreck enough of NATO airbases (which I'm not even sure have solid air defenses against maneuvering, fast missile salvos) and then if NATO wasn't resolute enough to H-bomb Russian formations on the wrong side of the border in Baltics, then yeah, maybe they'll get taken over.
Which would be a net benefit to EU because 60-90% of working age non-Russians will just move away.
"How Czech Republic managed to get its Ministry of Justice investigated for money laundering of cca 4000+ bitcoin from a darknet drug marketplace"
“It was so ultra-legal that it couldn’t be more legal,” the justifiably former Minister of Justice Pavel 'Don Pablo' Blažek. [1]
Finally, some a bit 21st century news. I put this into CW and not 'fun' because 'populists might benefit'.
In march of '25 , the Ministry of Justice in Czech Republic accepted about $40 million gift in the form of 864 bitcoin. I briefly remembered the news item: MoJ is selling bitcoin in auction.
Now, the justice minister has resigned, the ministry is being investigated for money laundering, the minister is being investigated for abusing his position and Tomáš Jiříkovský, who gave the gift is missing.
The timeline, so far, seems to be something like:
2013/3: Tomáš opens Sheep Marketplace (SM) opens. Initially scarcely used and amateurish, it gets a lot of users after Silk Road collapses.
2013/10: Silk Road closes. People flood to SM
2013/12: SM hacked, 5400 client bitcoin stolen according to its admins. Real amount is unknown, possibly up to 96,000.. Tomáš closes the market and pockets the rest of the bitcoin clients had there.
2014-2016: Tomáš runs 'Nucleus', another darknet marketplace. He tries to launder the stolen money and attracts NCOZ (kind of like Czech FBI without counterintelligence duties).
2016/4/12 Tomáš is arrested by the Czech police.
2016/4/13 Nucleus marketplace stops responding and again, client bitcoin go missing. It's obvious Tomáš was running Nucleus. Police never investigate him for this.
2018: Tomáš is sentenced to 9 years for drug trading, embezzlement and illegal weapons to 9 years. His electronic devices areconfiscated. State intends to wipe it to prevent the perp from benefitting from the proceeds of a crime. The perp's lawyers contest this.
2021: Tomáš is out due to good behavior. He starts to petition the courts, first to prevent data destruction, then to return his seized devices.
2025/1 The courts finally rule that he can get them all back.
2025/3 For no ostensible reason, Tomáš proposes to gift the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) about $40 million in bitcoin that's supposedly not stolen. There's going to be an expert witness present to attest to that it's not stolen darknet bitcoin, the transaction will be overseen by a notary too. This happens and is covered in crypto news, who are of course unaware of who is involved.
2025/5/30: this hits the news, perhaps due to Tomáš, who seems to be an ADHD guy with a vocational school degree only, making the list of richest people in Czech Republic. Revelations soon follow: the expert witness was paid by Tomáš. The wallet was opened 10 hours before the notary got there - they did not want to waste his time while dealing with the encrypted wallet. It's determined up to 4000 bitcoin were sent from the wallet to various addresses before the notary got there to witness the gift to MoJ.
2025/6 Tomáš departs for parts unknown - probably because people missing their bitcoins are are offering bounties for his whereabouts. Minister of Justice resigns. FBI gets involved.
Some important notes: most everyone involved in this case is connected to Masaryk univerzity in Brno (~750k), the second largest city in Czech lands, much hated by people from the capital.(1500K). Tomáš's grandfather was a professor there. The prime minister and the justice minister both studied there. Tomáš lived in Břeclav, a town close to it.
My suspicions: based on the lot of Czech language info I've read on this case, it looks like the justice minister ensured the courts ruled to not wipe the devices, and some of the other bitcoin were likely gifted to people backing the staunchly pro-war and pro-American government parties. The courts obliged but in their verdicts strongly protested and said the bitcoin were proceeds of a crime. Of course, this implies the prime minister knew about this too. But the it's believed is the justice minister is more influential than the PM, and claimed to be ' regional godfather',
If you want to know more, some sources in Czech:
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoinov%C3%A1_kauza
https://zandl.substack.com/p/97-jak-tomas-jirikovsky-a-ministr
[1]: the two time justice minister is suspected of being a grey eminence / involved in many shady influence deals. https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/pavel-blazek-ministr-spravedlnosti-rezignace-profil.A250530_165132_domaci_ikul
No_one
4mo ago
budge upwards despite dumping trillions into AI
a) We didn't.
b) it takes time to integrate new tech into business and to figure out how to best use it. Reasoner models are what, 3 months old now?
But I also wouldn't be surprised if life in 2030 is much the same as it is in 2025.
You'll be a little lucky if you're even alive. Pacific War 2: Electric Boogaloo and it's possible thermonuclear complications aside, there's many, many people who think like Ziz, there doesn't seem to be a good way of preventing jailbreaks reliably and making very deadly pathogens that kill in a delayed manner is not hard if you don't care about your own survival that much. And in any case, It looks like for a ~500k$ people will be able to run their own OS AGI in isolation, meaning moderately rich efilist lunatics could run their own shitty biolabs with help and spend as much time figuring out jailbreaks as needed, with no risk of snitching.
No_one
5mo ago
No thread on Deepseek r-1 fun?
I'll start: how funny it is that a communist hedge fun started a side project and built at 15x cheaper alternative to US models, and open-sourced it (MIT license). One US guy (Brian Roemelle) says they did 37 installs of full models for private customers..
It has a wicked sense of humor. Here's what someone got when he was asking it, through the API, not the chat app which is censored about Chinese politics. He wasn't asking for a funny meme though. It seems quite..creative, especially with adjusted temperature. The thinking it does seems.. fairly human-like. Strings together concepts and then considers them. It can chase its own tails, thought wise. I kinda suspect our own thinking, at least about words not RL stuff is similar.
Here it is (prompted) making fun out of US AI labs. Through API access.. it will give reasonable, uncensored answers unlike the chat app which says discussing the existence or non-existence of Xi is beyond its scope. If you have a 4090, you can run one of the distillations, I think the 32B one.
People are of course also using it also for ERP and it's remarkably good at it, perhaps too unhinged so requires careful promptings. Even more unhinged example, but if you're a little jaded it's good for a chuckle and finding out that yes, you can still wince.
No_one
6mo ago
Usually they just need to lose weight.
It's mostly because women hate women with big boobs. Really hate.
The maths is easy - huge boobs are very rare, but their appeal is substantial. About a third of men have a straight out mentality of 'the bigger the better', so the 1 in 30 woman with huge ones has a big edge. There's also some back pain but nothing 20 minutes of exercise a week wouldn't fix.
It'd matter quite a bit.
Maybe 20-30%. Shells are very hard to intercept and potent, when aimed properly. Artillery caused like 50% of casualties when used with ground spotting with line of sight or plane directed. (was nowhere near universal, iirc only Americans did it)
Missile systems like HIMARS and Smerch and Tornado allow hitting targets up to 100 km in. Tactical missiles, for which Russia is characteristically making with huge warheads of up to 800 kg, [can accurately hit targets at 400 km.] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K720_Iskander#Iskander-M). Unless you can prevent enemy from sneaking drones all over your airspace, there's no such thing as a 'front line'. There's just a region of pain where the slightest mistake can result in getting the equivalent of a 3-4 ton bomb falling at you with a 1-2 minute warning. Fuel-air explosives are more potent than high explosives.
But what about the NATO air forces? Well, even if missiles strikes disabling airbases are avoided, the expectation is reducing air defense to allow combat missions that aren't suicidal would take weeks to months. Yeah, you could whittle that down fast if you had thousands of AI-guided small drones outranging big SAMs ready to go, but NATO doesn't have that. And i've seen no indication they want to procure such. What's going on is they're buying Israeli 'stand-off' munitions at outrageous cost (something like $500k per one drone). That's probably, not gonna cut it unless cost goes down by a factor of 10-50x.
Modern war is just a whole different beast than what it used to be.
Let's remember that western military doesn't have a stealthy drone with ~100 km range and hours of loiter capacity per each howitzer. Even though it very well could. At some point, we're going to get a whole ecosystem of autonomous drones patrolling the airspace to prevent enemy recon, laser dazzlers to prevent satellite recon. But we're not there. Even if SV won over the MIC and started making these air-defense drones in bulk, it'd take 5 years to build up enough to matter for NATO. And they won't win. Billions in stock valuations are at stake here!
More important stuff:
-anti-aircraft missile production (US Patriot production is expected to go up to 600 a year. A year!). I've never seen figures on Russia but they seem well aware of the utility so it was likely a lot higher.
US has nothing like the Pantsir system, which is designed to be economical, with cheap, high performance missiles. No expensive seeker, basically a fast missile guided by impossible to jam commands from the radar and a proximity fuze).
-whether stealth actually works (unclear. You can detect stealth aircraft using bounces to places other than the radar, so called 'multilateration. With satellite comms, you don't even need to set up microwave relays between these sites.)
-degree of dysfunction in western militaries. Oppressing sand people doesn't translate well to contending with an enemy who can't wait but put a small, tiny drone above your unit and blow your entire headquarters section up with a 300mm missile. (Himars, Tornado-U?, beats me what Chinese call theirs). You need completely different tactics, weapons to kill and detect small drones etc. Winning at such a conflict would be hard even if you had an infinite budget and enough competent, serious people.
-whether China gets involved (imo a certainty, China allowing Russia to fall due to a lost conventional war would put more enemy bases on their borders. And allow yanks to embargo them almost totally on gas and oil).
No_one
7d ago
Alcohol is way too widespread to really ban, in addition relatively easy to make at home.
I keep being somewhat amazed by what R1 can do. It's really, really good at writing. Anyway:
Question: how do I buy API access? Deepseek's order page seems down. Perplexity.AI is really expensive going the obvious route. Anyone knows something about that.
Answer: probably the best way is using OpenRouter.ai . There's some free API access too, but it's kind of slow.
Question: did anyone manage to get the R1 model, which uses some novel form of selective quantisation and can allegedly run at a modest speed on a 4090 running?
Answer: .. yeah, you can run a dynamically quantised R1 but the speed is going to be <1 token.
Some fun stuff:
Youtube video: How to make an AI girlfriend smarter than you using deepeseek.
After following the guide: setting up WSL2, installing uv, installing vllm we got DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B running on a 4090. Must have made some major error as it runs at only .6 t/s which is only sufficient for very, very old people. Should run at perhaps 4-6 at least judging by what others have seen. Update: no error. Unless you have god-tier CPU/memory you can expect <3 tokens from big models. You need GPUs for more token /s.
Also people, just use Docker images with Text Generator Inference.. it's probably as good as vllm and it can also (allegedly) handle dynamically quantized LLMs which means you can load a better model into less memory and run it. vllm struggles with that.
No_one
2yr ago
Resettlement was actually resettlement
One of the justifications for Holocaust was that Jews were implacable and treacherous, hence exacerbating the partisan problem on the eastern front by shipping in a million+ Jews there in 1942... yeah, pretty funny suggestion.
What's a next suggestion, that Stalin somehow accepted ~ 2 million assorted European Jews who didn't speak Russian in some sort of very sneaky prisoner transfer ?
No_one
1yr ago
Friends I cannot stress this enough: have kids.
As many as 10-30% of younger generations can't even have sex. Sure they could 'technically' have kids through IVF but the idea itself is sitcom-worthy I think.
No_one
1yr ago
People don't want to talk about the war because
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by and large, the west is losing it because of bad procurement, industrial output and planning
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despite their skepticism about particulars -wokism, governance, I'm betting most people here are in favor of US hegemony and see the countries involved as somehow 'theirs' - something like the nationalist delusion. No, they aren't. The countries belong to people who have power and influence in them - and that ain't you unless you're a billionaire with an entire department of lobbyists and a prominent position in CFR etc.
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it's a rather gnarly affair, entirely possible there's been up to half a milion dead by now, 3/4 of that Ukrainian. I'm basing that claim on the estimates of amputees being 25-50k according to press quoting charities, and the amputee/KIA ratio being certainly somewhere between 6 (GWOT) to cca 30 (WW1).
So, it's perfectly clear why we aren't talking about it.
There's no biological imperative that men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses, or makeup, or be considered submissive or cute.
Are you sure about that ? You think sexuality is entirely environmental, there are is no genetic component to it ?
That's bullshit.
The fundamental asymmetry between male and female genetic interests has been there essentially forever. Submissive men do exist, but they're more rare than the other way around.
And as to cute... ditto. Men aren't cute. You can try to 'consider' them cute, but that's the same level of as talking about feminine penises.
No_one
2yr ago
One of the few bits that could actually be falsified, doesn't support Hersh's claim.
Because the US, you know, the country that hacked control software of airgapped centrifuges and thus wrecked them wouldn't be able to, after months of preparation mess up badly secured data on a couple of websites in order to deflect attention ?
No_one
2mo ago
Other estimates put Ukraine's KIA higher, certainly, but I haven't seen a method that compares Russia vs Ukraine like for like without the ratio being in Ukraine's favor.
Ukrainians admitted Russia has a parity in drone quality and quantitative superiority. Ditto for artillery. It follows that if they are basically comparable in terms of intelligence and doctrine, but have less weapons they're going to suffer more.
drones (Economist)
other weapons (Guardian, Syrsky interview)
Has Russia ever come up with peace terms that are close to credible?
Yes, they very credibly claim they're going to kill every single person who is going to prevent Russia from ensuring there are no foreign troops based on Ukrainian soil. Their peace terms right now were: Ukraine neutral, Russia keeps the 4 oblasts and Crimea, borders recognized.
No_one
2mo ago
But I think the Soviets leapfrogged or sidestepped the US on military tech more often than China has – maybe that's just vibes.
China has made the supercarrier obsolete. Is that not impressive? You know those Iskander missiles that have never been intercepted yet because they evade and allegedly can also drop countermeasures? Well, China has gliding anti-ship versions deliverable across half the planet. Is that not impressive?
No_one
1yr ago
I mean, why'd Chinese blow TSMC up ? By that point they'll have a better chip industry of their own, probably somewhat closer to state of the art than now but, but are unlikely to have caught up.
Americans would be due to massive loss of prestige probably unable to stop TSMC's non-US suppliers for working with it. And I don't think Chinese are the kind of die-hard scorched earth fanatics that they'd destroy TSMC rather than go on grinding out chips as before, with a new set of bosses.
List of alleged ex-FBI people working for Twitter.
Quite a lot of names. 16 directors or managers. All hired since the '16 debacle.
Reminds one of the Chinese demand for CPC members being in company management.
Is it random ? Or does this support the claim Twitter is uniquely important in the information landscape as a place where journalists get their stories and hang out.
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