functor
1d ago
The perception of Israel across the world has been in steady decline for the past 1.5 years. More Israeli warmongering and bombing just makes people dislike them more.
functor
1d ago
The US and Israel no longer want to do nation building and building friendly regimes. They are going for destruction. The new model is turning countries into Libya or Syria. Wrecked countries controlled by various competing militias. A disaster for the country, an eradication of the local Christians and a refugee crisis or Europe.
functor
1d ago
Who claimed they were pragmatic? They have an ideology that is completely opposed to the western view of war and ruthlessly commit war crimes.
functor
1d ago
The fact of the matter is Israels interest is a destablized middle east with weak neighbors. This has caused the to get in conflict with everyone around them and flooded Europe with migrants. It is a problematic country founded on an insane religious doctrine that is heretical to christianity and that is nothing but a headache to us. There is no reason to support them what so ever.
functor
1d ago
Iran's ongoing support for a global Islamic revolution
On the flip side they fought against the Jihadists in Syria and helped Syria defend itself. We should be thankful for that. When Iraq was invaded they helped Iraqis fight for their independence. They have not sponsored the type of muslims that attack European Christmas markets. Those types of jihadists are backed by Israel.
Who even cares what Iran thinks of the west? They are in their part of the world and are willing to trade with the other parts of the world. The US and Israel has smashed other countries and supported jihadism. The US and Israel are against stable and reasonable states and wants to turn the middle east into a giant Afghanistan.
functor
1d ago
Iran has no reason to hate China. The US and Israel has been warmongering in the region for decades and created completely unnecessary conflicts. The US could very will have had amicable relations with Iran. Instead they had warmongering and aggressive policies that have made the relation hard to fix.
Iran negotiated a deal with the US that the US then broke. The US invaded Iraq twice and Afghanistan. The US has a long history of bombing the middle east, assassinating people and destroying countries. The Iranians have every reason to be skeptical.
functor
1d ago
The desire for another Iraq war fiasco is extremely low. More war mongering in the middle east, more refugees to Europe, surging oil prices and another forever war was not what Trump campaigned on for a reason. All these wars have been disasters and there is no reason to think the next war won't be as bad as Libya, Iraq, Syria or Yemen.
It is unpopular now and it will be as unpopular as Iraq war 2.0 was once this fiasco has ended.
functor
1d ago
China is the largest trading partner to most countries in the middle east. They managed to do this and have large numbers of Chinese people working in the middle east by not wasting trillions enraging the middle east by bombing them. Israel supported jihadists in Syria, Europe got culturally enriched and the same terror groups attacked Europe.
The best thing the US could do to strengthen its position in the middle east would be to pull out all troops.
functor
3d ago
As others have stated the bad behavior by ill behaving cyclists is just so so bad.
Funny how this mainly seems to be the case in cities that are extremely poorly designed for bicycles.
Brainless degenerates seem to be a minority of people behind the wheel of a car,
I see speeding cars and wrongly parked cars all the time.
functor
5d ago
One of the most interesting things about google's AI is their vertex studio. It allows you to use datasets, finetune models build services such as chatbots, supply chain services, industrial planning and medical services. The amazing thing is how easy these services are to use. No code is required and adanced services can be built by a noob in hours.
A lot of startups with inflated valuations have products that can be built in an afternoon with the right dataset. Instead of having an AI team, companies will be able to pay 300 dollars to someone on fiver to configure the same thing on vertex AI.
As for LLMs there fundamental flaw is that they don't store recent information and context well. A human mind is more of a flow of information and new informantion is consitently stored within the brain. LLMs don't really do memory and are poor at learning. They require millions of hours of training. A human can pick up new facts and skills much quicker and carry those facts and skills with him. LLMs are like a high skilled person who suffers from extreme short term memory damage.
For AGI/ASI to become real the neural networks will have to learn much faster and be able to learn on the fly.
functor
7d ago
Could AI be the next big thing without impacting the economy and labour market?
Computers revolutionized the construction industry. CAD software makes it far easier to draw buildings and share the drawings. Phones makes communications vastly easier. Instead of a worker getting stuck or having to physically find someone they can make a video call. Manuals and documents are freely available online. Online shopping makes order parts cheaper and easier while allowing builders to press prices. Accounting, scheduling, recruiting sales and other supporting activities are easier with computers. Even on the construction site computers control machines. A modern truck is full of software.
Yet the productivity in the construction industry has flat lined and is if anything declining. Land prices can take some blame but renovating a building has not become cheaper.
Could we see similar effects with AI? A company in 2035 has completely automated customer service, AI drafts contracts, does sales and codes. We may have self driving cars and humanoid robots. Yet we might see barely 2% GDP growth and no real boom in productivity. Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity and can the results be better in the coming 20 years?
functor
8d ago
Most likely Elon came in with incredible energy and his typical spirit of wanting radical change in a pace that leads to cities on mars with autonomous cars and humanoid robots in 10 years. He then comes into government and has to act with mainstream republicans that are tugging on Trump in the opposite direction.
functor
14d ago
He isn't right-wing, he is a life long leftist who has been consistently right about the forever wars, the surveillance state, military industrial complex and the over reach of intelligence agencies. As a right winger I don't like his social policies but I deeply respect the work he has done with Ed Snowden on the NSA and his continued reporting on the war machine.
functor
15d ago
As a startup founder LLMs are enormously useful but not primarily for coding.
LLMs are great for issues such as: "which AWS service to use", how to make pitch deck, which type of adds should I buy, how do I configure a firewall for my server, how to find a good accountant, how to file taxes, gitlab or github and so on.
I don't have a large team of experts, I don't have a lot of time and I have a multitude of different roles. I am CFO, CTO, CEO, dev ops engineer, lawyer, and HR. AI allows me to be somewhat competent at all these tasks and allows me to solve them quickly. The new paid version of ChatGPT is great at quickly producing mock ups and even suggestions for features and user stories.
LLMs are going to allow far more people to start a company and to be able to launch things. Need a NDA and LLMs will make a professional looking PDFs in a minute or two.
functor
18d ago
To slightly derail your post, what is the best way to judge one's market value? How do I know if the problem is tinder or my expectations?
Would the market benefit from a impartial third party rater that could tell people what is realistic for them based on market conditions.
functor
18d ago
I am wondering if we are going to see a rise in relationships between ugly women and relatively attractive men. A lot of men are priced out of the dating market and will be forced to date down. There could be strange effects were a woman who is a 4 and a women who is a 7 could end up dating equally attractive men. We end up with the elite of women getting the elite of men. Then a huge surplus of men who are 6-8 attractive and a large span of women being able to meet equally attractive men with many choosing not to in the hopes of dating up.
functor
18d ago
Bars aren't that much better, often lower quality women and more women than men. Starting a hobby to meet women is not efficient at all. Signing up for tennis/pottery or language classes just to meet women is a massive commitment of time to say high to maybe one or two single women in your age group.
functor
18d ago
Virtues are dead so there is no point in up holding them. In Rome during Caesar's time the system was broken and people knew it. The same is true in modern day America.
When the system is broken and dysfunctional you need someone who doesn't care about the rules but instead can fix things. Trump and Caesar are both less focused on formalities and more focused and doing. The current system consists of people like the people in Versailles who were more concerned with trivialities at dinner parties than the national budget.
Trump's biggest issue is that he is far older than Caesar was when Caesar was in power and the US has far more institutional inertia than Rome had. Trump can't get nearly as much done even if he blatantly disregards the rules.
functor
22d ago
Israel bombed an embassy a few months ago and has a long history of fighting dirty. They shouldn't be surprised that they get the same treatment back. The expectation can't be that they can finance terrorism, assassinate people, and bomb embassies and then not get the same back.
functor
26d ago
Sweden and Finland barely pay at all. Mass conscript militaries don't really pay troops.
functor
26d ago
Not a volunteer firefighter but served a decade in an army reserve unit in a European country.
First off the quality of these types of organizations vary massively depending on the volunteers they get. Volunteering and being active can make a major difference, and that does motivate a lot of people.
Excitement is a motivator. Regular life is boring and many strive for something a bit beyond it. You get interesting experiences, great training, action and some great stories.
It is a way of finding a group of guys on a mission. Usually the quality of men is reasonably high, and the team spirit is good.
Compared to other hobbies it is still financially lucrative. Boating, motorcycles or mountaineering are far worse financial decisions than serving in a volunteer organization yet you still get cool toys. Arguably cooler toys than most hobbyists.
For some there is social prestige, for some they want to show that they are tough and manly and not just weak office workers. Some want to escape their regular lives, others want to break the monotony of 9-5 office work.
functor
29d ago
We are building things, AI, GPUs financial projects. These fields attract talent and money.
A hundred years ago electricity was as hyped as AI is today. It was a complete transformation. It was magic and few people understood it. The projects were massive, high tech and at a scale that was far beyond most industries. Young, smart, motivated people wanted to work in the power grid. Trains were once futuristic, magical high budget projects that were far beyond the scale of what people were used to. They attracted top talent.
Today, capital and talent doesn't flow to maintaining old power lines or freight rail. The cool people have moved on decades ago. Left are less talented people and people with less drive.
Rather, the people in the west are generally negative to Israel. Even Americans are net negative to Israel. Western politicians go against the will of the people and cuck endlessly to Israel regardless of what Israel does because of Israel's extreme influence. This becomes a problem when the voters are not onboard, yet they have to officially worship Likud.
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