VecGS
Chaotic good
No bio...
User ID: 599
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
I think the long-form, low-volume nature of much of this forum is probably a turn-off for folks who are used to watching shorts on whatever platform they're using. The other side is that ad hominem attacks aren't really well tolerated here. The fact you can catch a ban for low-effort posting would immediately disqualify much of the net.
I'm not saying the a group of debate nerds can't be compromised. But I agree that the juice here probably isn't worth the squeeze.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
It's like that on his wiki page for what it's worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy.
The transliterations from Ukrainian to English have some gray areas from what I've read.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
I have had an evolving set of view on the conflict in Ukraine that seems to annoy just about everyone. With the news today about Trump and Zelenskyy it's even more relevant.
I’m going to start with the present state of the conflict. This is, for this exercise, going to be called…
Option A - Stalemate and Attrition
Where we are now is an attritional battle with relatively static front lines. What I’ve observed is that there are many “red lines” that the supporters of Ukraine have. This leads to aid being sent simply to preserve the status quo. Ukraine, as much as it would want to win, is prohibited from actually winning because that might give Russia a sad and lead to world war 3.
This is a similar position we were in while in Vietnam. We were fighting for the same hills over and over again. There was no effort to actually win. Unlike Vietnam, where the U.S. faced a guerrilla insurgency, Ukraine’s conflict involves a nuclear-armed Russia, raising the stakes and complicating any path to outright victory.
In my mind, this is the worst option. Unless you get Russia to capitulate, Ukraine will not get enough concessions to maintain her previous borders. This war can go on as long as both sides have men to throw into the meat grinder. Simply because providing enough support for Ukraine to win is off the table.
Clearly both sides will continue to fight on mostly static lines indefinitely.
This isn’t just from a US perspective, all of the arms donations that were given to Ukraine up to this point by basically everyone includes clauses to not attack Russia. We, as a world, are telling the Ukrainian people to fight with one arm behind their proverbial backs. It’s a scenario that they can’t win with.
This option might eventually weaken Putin internally if Russia’s economy or morale crumbles, but banking on that is a gamble with long odds. They seem to have a deep bench of people who share the same values and motivations as Putin himself. Based on surveys and polls I’ve seen, this conflict still has much popular support from the people of Russia.
One has to ask, who is the winner in this scenario? The only plausible answer I have is only the military-industrial complex. Ukraine isn’t winning. Russia isn’t winning. Arms manufacturers are winning. With static front lines fueling endless demand for weapons, defense contractors profit while neither Ukraine nor Russia gains ground.
A prolonged stalemate, which is what this leads to, could erode NATO’s credibility, leave Ukraine a fractured state, and embolden other aggressors watching the West’s indecision.
This leads to…
Option B - Full Commitment
Here’s where we would treat Ukraine as the ally that they should be. This is where you own up to the Budapest Memorandum that was signed by Yeltsin and Clinton to provide security guarantees for the territorial integrity of Ukraine. (The 1994 Budapest Memorandum saw Ukraine give up nukes for security guarantees from Russia, the U.S., and others—guarantees now in tatters.)
To be clear, this has been my position since basically day 1 of the conflict. Day 1, for me, is Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, not just the 2022 escalation, per the Budapest Memorandum’s promises. A direct conflict between nuclear powers is historically unprecedented. Sometimes, the correct moral choice entails risks.
Russia’s 2022 invasion, unlike 2014, exposed Putin’s broader ambitions, forcing the West to rethink its hesitation.
This option would entail actual support from allied nations, not just good wishes and materiel, but boots on the ground. Short of that, Option B could include bolder support, like unrestricted use of Western weapons, though even this risks Russian retaliation.
Here’s the thing, you have two options, either Russia is an existential threat or it’s not. If they are a real threat, then the answer should always be to support the morally right answer. If that leads to a broader conflict, then so be it — it’s a just war based on the reality. If they are not an actual threat… and Ukraine isn’t really an ally, why are we even talking?
Winding back a bit to option A, to put things into perspective, what we’re presently doing is pretty much what led to WW2. Chamberlain and the rest of the west were in a stance of appeasement. By not actually fighting evil, we let it grow. Just as appeasement emboldened Hitler to push further, letting Russia keep gains now might signal to Putin—and others—that aggression pays.
The broad statement here is that you can’t simply spend your way to victory. No amount of donations of money or supplies will get Ukraine back without Russia losing the conflict they started.
This option is, for all intents and purposes, completely off the table.
So…
Option C - Negotiated Settlement
Here’s the unpopular one. Negotiated peace to end the conflict. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is happy with this. With this Ukraine will lose territory and some level of autonomy.
Given that we, as a world, can’t seem to stomach the concept of Russia losing, which takes Option B out as a solution, you’re left with Option A or C.
Since Option A does nothing but throw more men into the meat-grinder for no gains by either side, I think it’s the worst outcome. I don’t like Option C in any way, but it seems fare less bad than having the same outcome, but more death.
That said, a negotiated peace ceding territory might end the fighting but could set a precedent that territorial conquest pays off, weakening the global order.
Option C feels like a bitter pill; it’s pragmatic but forces Ukraine to sacrifice land and pride, a tough ask for a nation fighting for its survival. Some might say a negotiated peace stabilizes the region short-term, but history—like Munich in 1938—warns that rewarding conquest invites more.
…but wait, a surprise…
Option B’ - Two-Front War Risk
Ok, let’s pretend that we actually have the balls to go fight Russia and curb-stomp them out of Ukraine (including, of course, Crimea). Does the US and her allies really have the ability to fight a two-theater war? I would question this.
If the U.S. commits fully to fighting Russia in Ukraine, it might leave Taiwan exposed to China. This would be the ideal time for China to do what they’ve been threatening to do for decades — invade and annex Taiwan.
We have to be really careful with how we’re throwing around our might.
A decisive victory could reshape Europe’s security landscape, but a two-theater war might strain U.S. and allied resources, leaving vulnerabilities elsewhere. If the U.S. goes all-in on Ukraine, China might see a green light to hit Taiwan, stretching allied forces thin across two continents.
Some historical context for a moment. When Russia attacked and annexed Crimea in 2014, the world’s reaction was an annoyed “tut tut.” Nothing happened. Russia shot down a commercial airliners and the sentiment was echoed again.
Nothing happened. Russia’s takeover was internationally condemned — tut tut — but met with limited Western response at the time.
Why is that?
Well, Obama was coming off a victory two years prior against Mitt Romney. All of the rhetoric was that Russia was not a threat.
“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back” in response to Romney saying that Russia is the biggest existent threat to the US and the world.
It would come off as almost comical to have the Obama administration immediately walk that back.
In Europe, Russia was also the supplier of natural gas to power the industrial nations there. Germany was committed to the absurd tactic of closing down their nuclear generation facilities so they were also against any action against Russia.
Tut tut.
Beyond these options, could intensified sanctions, diplomatic isolation, or mediation by neutral parties shift the dynamic? These might pressure Russia without the risks of Option B. Personally, I doubt it. Putin is in too deep to risk pulling out without something that can be claimed as a victory — and any victory would invariably put the scenario into Option C.
There are no good answers.
A continuation of the status quo, Option A, is, in my mind the worst outcome of all. It maximizes human suffering while having the same outcome as Option C.
Option B, my simple-minded “best” option, isn’t on the table because Russia has nukes. By the way, this shows that simply having nuclear weapons makes you unable to lose in the eyes of the world. It’s a non-ideal precedent in my mind.
Option B could also easily lead to B’ as well. That would also be a very not good outcome.
The one that disgusts me the least is Option C.
There are no good answers. Option A drags out the suffering with no end, Option B courts global chaos, and Option C trades Ukraine’s dreams for peace. I lean toward C as the least awful. It sucks. Royally.
Honestly, I would still lean towards B as the correct and moral choice, but I'm very much not in control of any of this.
The issue isn't that race is central to fare evasion, but any difference, or perhaps even more importantly, the perception of differences in the prosecution of fare evasion, will be used to show that this is a racist policy.
I spent around seven years living in Seattle. There are a few gangs in Seattle, generally based in the southern area. As it turns out, most of the participants of the gangs happen to be black. This led to the black gang members being arrested and prosecuted for crimes in a disproportionate way compared to the overall population of the city. Seattle's solution to this was to disband the gang unit.
Seattle Police’s Gang Unit was revised to the Gun Violence Reduction Unit (GVRU) in 2020. GVRU does not actively track gang data within Seattle. GVRU conducts the majority of investigations regarding gun violence, whether or not its gang related. Gang specialist Gabe Morales says several local gangs are still active in Seattle. (https://www.kiro7.com/news/investigates/monday-530-gangs-still-plague-puget-sound-especially-among-teens/57BJEHV4IVA65IT2NHPZYI7LGM/)
The criminal irony of this style of thinking is that the (in the case of Seattle) primarily black gangs tend to commit violence predominantly to the black community itself. By not dealing with the problem of gang violence, the black community is being further set back. It's all in the name of "equity" in terms of punishment since there doesn't happen to be any prominent white gangs.
Now apply the same to fare evasion. The moment you have blacks being arrested for it, even if it is proportional to the population, you'll have the activists protesting that this is racially motivated. The end result is that certain crimes go unpunished -- and once that happens, it's defacto no longer a crime. It gets compounded when the individuals involved know they're not going to be prosecuted so they continue to break the law even more.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
I'm American, born here to Hungarian parents. I've was raised learning what the USSR, now Russia, has done for the past century from very personal stories. To state my biases, I'm really rather anti-Russian.
I come at this from a position of morality -- well, my own personal morality, which is about the best I can do. We've given a commitment to Ukraine in 1994 to provide security assurances, and we've reneged on this several times over. The just and moral thing to have done is step up in 2014 to protect her like we said we would, ideally diplomatically, but militarily if pressed. We didn't do that, so it's water under the bridge at this point.
It's pretty clear to me that we're not going to force Russia to capitulate. The next most moral thing (according to me), is to find peace somehow. Continuing to fight this stalemate is not moral.
I'm not a huge fan of Trump's way of conducting business, but this could well be the US opting out. It's certainly going to be a forcing function if the US stops sending over money and materiel. The best-case scenario is probably the EU doing the negotiating. I doubt that Zelenskyy is going to be on board with that though.
As much as I don't want Russia to get a win on this, losing a generation of men (on both sides of the conflict) is worse.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
I posted my own treatise a few days ago. But the short summary is:
- We can continue to do what we have been presently doing, simply providing aid to maintain a stalemate.
- We could actually support Ukraine and liberate her from Russia through the involvement of allied nations' troops and/or removal of the restrictions on how Ukraine can use the provided weapons against Russia.
- Negotiate peace given the present situation. (with or without guarantees)
My contention is that #1 is maximally bad for Ukraine, it's an attritional war, and Russia can easily out-grind Ukraine over time. #2 may be maximally bad for the world (if it triggers WW3), though it may be the morally correct answer (depends on your morals, of course). By the actions of the aid providers, #2 is off the table because Russia losing is a red line for most. #3 stinks, but given the remaining choices, seems to be better.
I also don't think that a negotiated peace is sucking Putin's/Russia's cock or anything. It's accepting the present reality, especially when considering that we're not letting Russia lose.
Another angle is that saying that one "supports Ukraine," while sending a generation of her men to die is, to me, repugnant. It's treating the Ukrainian people as a pawn to use against Russia to simply tie them down and deplete their resources. While at the same time effectively destroying Ukraine in the process. I don't count that as effective "support." I will concede it's a rational idea if one is solely against Russia at all costs, but I think it's disingenuous to call it supporting Ukraine.
I agree. The thing I've been seeing is a drip-feed of aid that's perfectly calibrated to maintain the stalemate. My observation is that the collective West doesn't want to put Russia in a position of losing. Personally, I would be more than OK with them losing.
Edit responding to edit...
Yep, still agree. The West has been terrified of even the perception of escalating the conflict. They've gotten a little bit better at it, but still it's a piss-poor performance. We know what the US Military can do when allowed off the leash. The "amusing" battle we had with the Wagner Group in Syria is a testament to that.
The best time to have done that was three years ago. The second best time is now. But no one is doing that, and the option is off the table in reality.
You should either fight to win or devise a way to end fighting.
VecGS
Chaotic good
6mo ago
The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
I'm not sure how this would be possible. The departments are all staffed by True Believers and I would expect not much to really change. The past 40 years of "research" in the field has been concentrated on Critical Theory as a way of advancing their field. Without using that as a crutch, I'm not really sure what even is left. All that would be left is demographic studies that is more statistics than anything, and I don't think you need an department to do that.
Even from an ideological perspective, I'm not sure the field makes sense. What is the point of "Women's Studies" when one can't even pin down what a "woman" is, for instance?
Even more broadly, the underpinnings of Critical Theory assumes that various groups are homogenous and can be talked about in aggregate. This might make sense in large populations. However, much of the *-studies fields then perverts this concept into looking at individuals and tries to apply the same analysis techniques without the law of large numbers coming to its aid. It's a house of cards that is built on something I don't think is even rational to start with. You are left with "research" that is unprovable, unfalsifiable, and based mostly on feels.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
Android is weird.
The actual open-source parts of Android barely, if at all, work as an actual phone. Sure, it's running Linux under the covers so from that perspective it's open-source. Android builds on that with a very very bare UI and some of the plumbing. The thing is, any phone that is actually sold is running on not just the stock Android code, but an absolutely massive collection of proprietary code to deal with everything that makes the devices useful. Things like an app store, maps, messaging, running the physical phone hardware, making it pretty and usable.
I used to work at Amazon in their App Store. Amazon, with their Kindle tablets and the ill-conceived Fire Phone, run Android. But they forked off the open-source version because they didn't want to pay Google the licensing. Literally everything had to be reimplemented to get a device that works in any way. All of that is, of course, proprietary.
Of course, Amazon's effort to not have the licensing costs came with an absolute mountain of work. A building full of people doing all the custom code to get Android to something that is usable. Everything from a new app store, maps, push notifications, payment processing, the skins, everything. Ok, depending on the era, we either filled a building or a large chunk of one depending on which building we resided at. The hardware and base OS was handled by another group, Lab126, down in the Bay Area. And to top it off, since there's another app store, you have to get developers to submit their apps to that as well -- which was hard.
The tl;dr is that Android is the stone soup of OSS. It "works," but not in a way that is useful to end users.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
They’ve valued deterring or debilitating Russia higher than you.
This is the part that's getting me into some real-life arguments. My friends who say they support Ukraine also seem to hate Putin even more. Their hatred of Russia/Putin vastly overshadows the reality of what's going on to the actual Ukrainians they say they support. Men, both Ukrainians and Russians, are dying in droves. Somehow that seems to balance things out for them. I don't know.
It comes off as "I hate Putin, so I'm perfectly OK with all of you dying to achieve this goal."
It makes me a bit sad, honestly. How can one support Ukraine while at the same time knowing full well that you're just killing off a generation of her men?
VecGS
Chaotic good
6mo ago
Every once in a while we find yet another uncontacted tribe of people somewhere in the world. The most recent one I read about was in the Amazon.
Now, if these tribes were previously unconnected to the rest of the world, whatever "patriarchy" the rest of the world follows would not affect them. It's an unbiased sample. All of the published pictures I'm seeing are all men and no women.
The thing is that, in general, these tribes all seem to follow generally the same social schemes... the men seem to do the hunting, and the women tend to do the child-rearing and non-hunting activities. Now I'm sure there are some outliers where women are also doing hunting, but generally this isn't a thing.
From a purely physical perspective (and I'm assuming this isn't a controversial stand), being pregnant, giving birth, and the first year or so after giving birth to a child is hard and energy-intensive endeavor that would preclude many strenuous activities. Seeing as women are the only members of humanity that can do this, it would follow that societies would be set up around this. To be super specific, when I'm saying "women," I mean members of the human species who are adults and with a body form intended to produce the larger gametes we call "eggs" and gestate offspring internally and can produce nourishment for said offspring. The fact that I need to write this out, I find silly.
Men and women are different. Both men and women are needed and valuable. The progressive stance that men and women are entirely interchangeable and indistinguishable is laughable in my opinion. Men and women are different, and that's a good thing.
On the topic of SciAm, well, I dropped my subscription when they endorsed a candidate for the presidency last time around. To have science mix with politics takes away from the science aspect. Science is the search for truth -- not just "truth" that meshes with currently popular ideas.
VecGS
Chaotic good
3mo ago
I finally got the arcade machine that I've been working on complete!
It's built around a MiSTer FPGA plugged into a JAMMIX card that gives me a standard arcade connector. The cabinet is of my own design that I mostly built over a long vacation in December. It looks decent enough, but I know everything I would do differently if I were to built something like this again. The good thing is it's easy enough to service if I ever need to do anything to it.
At some point I might go and mask around the screen, but I'm really not offended by the way it looks right now.
VecGS
Chaotic good
6mo ago
My sub $1000 drone (DJI Mini 4 Pro) can fly for over half an hour with the default battery (keeping it under the 250g weight limit where other rules kick in) and around 45 minutes with the slightly heavier battery. It has a range of around 20-30 miles if you maintain line-of-sight.
It's actually rather remarkable how cheap some of this stuff has become.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
I'm far from where those decision-makers worked so take this with the appropriate-sized grain of salt.
Amazon, like most companies, is a profit-maximizing entity. The thing that separates them from most other companies is the types of decisions that people are allowed to make. The leadership principles they have, as much as I made fun of them while I was there, truly are a driving force on the inside.
Here's what I'm figuring happened. I have zero knowledge that it happened this way, but it tracks based on my time there. (seven years)
- We already have the Kindle line of e-readers and it's driving a lot of purchases of content, except that content is solely limited to books -- purely black & white books.
- As Amazon, we already have things like Amazon Video, Comixology (the comic book distributor we bought), Amazon Music. All sorts of things.
- We need to have another platform to make money on that. Let's make something in a similar form factor to an iPad.
- It needs to run things. We can't just make something that solely consumes only Amazon content because that's not a compelling enough product. The only other viable avenue is Android, which already has some middling adoption for the tablet market.
- If we ship the Android that people expect, we need to pay Google (realistically a competitor in many ways) money for ever unit sold. Not only that we lose control over the platform since the Google Play Store pushes products that compete with our own. The economics of the razor blade model don't work if you don't lock in your customers to your brand of razor blades.
- The licensing of Android insists that it's the Google way or the highway. You can't pick and choose what Google things you want -- it's all or nothing.
- Hey, we're Amazon -- we have an endless supply of really good programmers. We can do this ourselves.
So, to have any hope of getting third-party apps on a startup platform, you only had Android to choose from. The thing is, we were hounding the third-party publishers to even engage with us. Even though we're one of the biggest companies in the world, and we're selling a large fraction of the Android tablets out there, no one even cared. Even if we could get a publisher to put something in our app store, they would ignore it and it would become wildly out of date typically.
And that's with Android. The publishing process was typically upload your APK and press a few buttons. And it was like pulling teeth to get that done.
I think even Amazon realized that, despite their size, asking devs to make new apps was a bridge too far.
Could Amazon have just stuck with a base Linux distribution and built something from that. Yes. Easily. Arguably easier than making an Android clone in many ways. Yes, it's "Android," but from so much of the public Play Store APIs needed to be reverse engineered and reimplemented.
And I'm 100% sure they would have used Linux. The institutional knowledge of Linux in there is astonishing -- especially when you start engaging the AWS folks.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
When looking at the statement "I support Ukraine" while simultaneously pursuing a strategy that ensures this is an unwinnable conflict -- I think those statements/ideas very much oppose each other.
From a purely strategic standpoint, yes, it makes perfect sense to treat another country as cannon fodder to occupy your enemy. Why would you have your men die when you can force other men to die instead? But one has to be aware that you're treating that country as cannon fodder. How is that support? With friends like that, who needs enemies?
If you come at this from a purely anti-Russia angle, then yes, endless war is a great use of funds. The ROI is incredible!
While I'm anti-Russian, I find it a repugnant option. Because I support the Ukrainian people.
VecGS
Chaotic good
6mo ago
The general feeling I get (not a dog owner myself, FWIW) is that people have been conditioned to think they are special in some way. Their dog (or kid, or whatever) is better than everyone else's. That mixed with a bit of main character syndrome and you get what we see now. Maybe this is what happens when you give everyone awards when growing up?
Another angle that would support this same outcome is that it seems to be considered rude to tell someone not to do something or that whatever they are doing is "weird." You make the accused a "victim," and suddenly, they have that as a bludgeon to wield against you. I'm not a proponent of bullying, but that tended to keep people more in line and enforced a sense of shared social norms.
I have no idea how to get back to "normal."
VecGS
Chaotic good
8mo ago
Guilty as charged. I was excitedly a progressive when I moved to Seattle 12 years ago and moving there to be at one of the epicenters was cool. I even donated to Bernie... It turns out that living in a city that is so one-sided in beliefs as well as politics was a real eye-opener. The backlash from when Trump was first elected and doing nothing but just about literally doing the opposite of whatever Trump was for was maddening. You could almost see people ignore their own underlying beliefs to show to their neighbors they aren't Trump supporters.
I left Seattle five years ago as a conservative and moved to a rural outskirt of Nashville. I was equally excited to move this last time.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
Certainly. I'm not arguing that. But the way they've done things is kind of like a Trojan Horse. You get a bunch of stuff, but you also lose nearly all control.
They're giving it away because it drives more revenue to them based on what's required from the licenses. They not only make money with licensing the Google tech, but they get their 30% cut on app sales, and everything else.
They ceded the hardware market, smartly, and kept the money-making parts.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
-Did the US-led proposal even involve Western civilians on the border? It didn't specify that from what I can tell, just that the US would have a future investment stake in Ukraine (not that the mines would be operated by westerners, or that they would be built soon, or that they would be near to the front line).
Even having US interests close to the border would serve as quite a deterrent in my opinion. It also gives Putin an out because it wouldn't be troops on their border.
-Is there not a wider possibility space where Russia's negotiated peace comes with official acceptance of its new borders and in exchange Ukraine gets NATO membership? I would think there is give and take to be had here
I'll start by saying I'm not being a mind reader of Putin, but I would be surprised if he went for this. My gut feel it there would have to be a lot more concessions in terms of a DMZ on the Ukrainian side for anything like this to even be considered, and I'm not sure if you could even have an ascension into NATO if you're in that type of agreement. It would be in Ukraine's interest in this case to goad Russia into a conflict so they could invoke Article 5. I think this would apply in the case of NATO or just unaffiliated troops.
...also just a guy on the internet...
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
We can examine the various scenarios here.
With a security guarantee -- the mere suggestion of having NATO (or even NATO adjacent) troops in Ukraine is one of the things that caused Putin to start this war. If we are trying to negotiate a peace, there's little chance that Russia would agree to this. Honestly, the only way that I think this could happen is if Russia were to actively lose this war and terms could be dictated, as was the case for Germany post WW2. The West doesn't seem to even want Russia to lose, so this is a non-starter, regardless of my opinions.
Without a security guarantee -- this splits into two possibilities. A lasting, if tenuous peace, or a pause followed by more fighting. If there is peace, hooray! If it devolves into more fighting, then you're no worse off than the status quo realistically. If Russia truly wants to destroy Ukraine, then unless the West actually steps up to defeat them, I don't think Ukraine could prevent this outcome. It's exactly the same as the first option of perpetual stalemate wherein Ukraine eventually runs out of men and has to concede.
The US-led proposal that was shot down was a middle ground, IMO. There are no troops on the front line (which is what Russia would never agree to), but there are Western civilians that would be there acting as a sort of trigger. It's far more palatable and could be presented to the Russian people as more of a victory. It would give them an offramp to peace.
The idea that the West can dictate and compel Russia what they must do with only a stern talking to is kind of pants-on-head crazy wishful thinking. The only way to achieve that outcome is to force a defeat. Forcing a defeat requires force, and all the good and bad that could potentially come from that.
VecGS
Chaotic good
6mo ago
I don't disagree. However, I doubt something like this would ever get made while the folks signing the checks are the same people cheering on the DEI, et al. initiatives.
Honestly, I'm hoping there's going to be sea change in the coming years and we get back to something more normal. There are so many changes going on all over the western world with people getting fed up with their governments. Who knows..?
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
I have no issue with open-source or making money. In fact I do programming for fun (not just for work) and I'm making and releasing OSS. I use one of the least restrictive licenses for the stuff I make: the MIT license.
Having been close enough to smell the code in question, I have to say that you're underplaying the power that Google has. Amazon is, to my knowledge, the only US company that forked AOSP and has a real product. The main other players are Chinese as they're not allowed to have Google-influence.
The thing with Google is they really do wield the license like a bludgeon. You are generally allowed to add things, and most everyone does, but you're not allowed to remove or replace any of the core functionality they provide. Excluding the edge cases of nerds (like me, if I used Android) rooting the devices, it's pretty locked down. And in many cases rooted devices can't participate in many things -- banking apps, for instance, seem to want to live on non-rooted devices. Many games as well.
Things like alternate app stores exist. You can side-load the Amazon Appstore on any Android -- as long as you turn on developer mode. But it's such a niche case IMO.
So yes, it is more open in an absolute sense. But from a practical standpoint, they have almost as walled a garden as Apple enjoys. That said, around the periphery, they allow fare more customization of your experience. But actual openness in the ways that matter, loading apps, paying for things, etc., they are quite walled off.
VecGS
Chaotic good
4mo ago
I agree -- my point was it's bitter compared to actually equipping them actually fight to win -- with the permission to win.
I know it's a lot of assumptions based solely on conjecture, but I would bet that in a timeline where Harris won the election that the amount of aid and weapons would be proportional to the likelihood of Ukraine losing. Other than the thunder runs around Kharkiv and Kherson, there have been no really large-scale changes in land holdings. Even the incursion into Kursk isn't that significant land-wise -- basically one small town. The reason I make this argument is that every increase in the lethality of aid from the West was made seemingly perfectly proportional to ensure nothing changes.
The core of my argument is that continuing on this path of "just enough for stalemate" is the worst option for Ukraine, despite the fact that everyone seems to be for it based on their actions. Even if Russia doesn't take additional major cities, nothing is gained by not going for peace at this point. Worst still if Russia gains the initiative as you suggested and starts making real gains -- then you just have a smaller Ukraine and still more fighting and death. I don't see how that is a better option for them.
VecGS
Chaotic good
3mo ago
I appreciate it... Let me take a pass through it again first. While I don't think AI is the be-all end-all, I agree with the conclusions it has on my manuscript:
- Restructure Act 1 to introduce the main conflict earlier
- Deepen Francis' character with clearer goals and internal conflict
- Develop the foundation for Francis and Laily's relationship more gradually
- Expand the climax and resolution for a more satisfying conclusion
- Create more complex, three-dimensional antagonists
And this is just what it considered "highest priority."
Of course this is what you get when you get a non-writer like me writing something. I didn't even have a full plot in my head before I started writing. I only got a vague idea about the actual ending in the last week. So all the criticism I got from the machine is warranted in my eyes.
I lived in Seattle for seven years... the issue is that any racial disparity in outcomes is treated as an equity problem. To sweep things under the carpet, the solution that has been come up with is to stop enforcing the laws.
It is common to have many years expired registration, which is supposed to be paying a large share of the transit budget. It's also common for people to simply not pay on transit either. Seattle's light rail doesn't have turnstiles, so everyone is basically on the honor system. People have noticed that you don't need to pay. Any enforcement is met with cries of inequity.
The whole equity-based system that is put in place by "progressive" policies leads to all sorts of easily foreseen outcomes. But if you dare mention it in polite circles, you're deemed a right-wing Nazi.
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