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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36632 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I feel like people have majorly updated toward thinking Russians are... kind of like Africans because of the way the war is waged and Russian elites behave, so now it's surprising when a Russian product is competitive with a Western one, or even superior. How could Orcs build something beautiful? Must be meh. I've seen it discussed more than once that Soviet STEM was just Jews who were prevented from leaving, too.

Yandex is leagues above most Asian and Europoor companies, and is a proper Bay Area tier Big Tech, with a stack of cutting edge AI-based applications on top of text search. The best voice assistant, the best navigation, the best AI weather forecast, the best open-source LLM. (Or rather, it used to be; now its promising self-driving department, for instance, got relocated to Israel, on a questionable legal basis). The next big thing in open source text to image generation is apparently made by a guy from Sberbank, following the ruDalle line. Heck, even Mail.ru is fairly competitive.

Ongoing dissolution of those entities is a national tragedy that in the long run may well eclipse the war's cost in blood.

There definitely is a discrepancy in how Westerners think about Russians vs how Non-Westerners like me. My surprise at Yandex's quality was not because it's Russian but because it's actually very good, yet no one uses it. I'll try out Yandex's other tools since you claim they are exceptional as well.

Naive or ignorant as it may be, In my headcanon, the Russians were always competent people who just had to have the worst leaders of all time, The Soviets produced no shortage of brilliant scientists or bad leaders. The fact that Russia was a superpower and still has certain trappings of that is still not lost on Asians. Or names like Sergey Brin or Ilya Sutskever are not exactly hard to figure out the root of. People in online gaming are still scared shitless of the mythical "Russian Hacker" who will DDoS you at best and empty your bank account at worst lest you anger him.

It does ultimately sadden me that Russia is so vehemently 'othered' by the West instead of let's say Saudi Arabia or even China (I wish we all got along but that's for a different universe).

Yeah being surprised at how good yandex images is specifically is very common because it's much better in many ways than google's or bing's or tineye, not that it's competitive and people think russians are dumb. The surprise is more 'google didn't do it' than 'yandex did'. Yandex search isn't that bad, nobody remarks on it.

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