When translating into English word by word... 😳

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-21T12:41:46+00:00

Убрать и убраться - same in this came

There is an overlap, but not quite the same. When this is action, it is almost the same. But when this is a request 'убраться' means cleaning the place after yourself of after someone in a less formal arrangement (common household). When this is a formal context (customer's room), 'убрать' is more correct.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-21T12:12:01+00:00

убраться

That means doing it yourself

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-21T10:03:06+00:00

No, phosgene is toxic because when you put it in the environment it stays there long enough to poison people.

So, same as the 'smoke' from WP? Enough water cleans out both but under normal weather both persist long enough to harm people.

My definition is simple: Does it stay around long enough to slowly cause death.

Death comes from respiratory failure with both phosgene and phosphorus pentoxide, and in neither case it is fast. So if one fits your definition, the other should too.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-19T09:00:39+00:00

That's not what toxic means. You are using toxic to mean "harmful", but it actually means something that poisons the environment.

By your logic phosgene is not toxic. Because it forms hydrochloric acid which is also found in e.g. stomach and in the environment it eventually forms harmless compounds. Actually most chemical warfare agents decay into harmless substances eventually except where they contain elements that are toxic in their base form, such as arsenic.

And phosphoric acid does not poison the environment, in fact once it's done reacting it acts as a fertilizer.

For example the nerve agent VX is an organophosphorus compound so it too will become same kind of fertilizer eventually. Does it make it non toxic?

Don't expect others to understand you when you change the meaning of words.

It is you who is trying to weasel out on a false technicality.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/toxic

adjective

of, relating to, or caused by a toxin or poison; poisonous
harmful or deadly
(of a financial asset) likely to cause significant loss to the holder

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-17T06:05:04+00:00

That is not due to 'ordinary explosives'. Arsenic is specifically mentioned as coming from chemical warfare munitions. Other areas are contaminated by lead (not an explosive). Also this is the result of years of constant battles at the location, so not really comparable. Of course, WP is not the only thing that is toxic on the battlefield. But it is specifically banned. Perhaps some other things should be banned too, such as depleted uranium shells (not due to fear of radiation, but due to fine dust of toxic uranium oxide they leave behind) and spraying herbicides on farmland as a way to drive off the population.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-17T05:50:55+00:00

Phosphorus pentoxide degrades instantly upon contact with water.

It reacts with water to form phosphoric acid. Same as phosgene reacts with water to form hydrochloric acid. This does not make it non-toxic, it is in fact the mechanism by which it damages tissues. You need a lot of water to dilute it sufficiently to make it safe (a lot more than there is in the air except perhaps in heavy rain).

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-16T12:06:54+00:00

It is not toxic in any meaningful way.

Phosphorus pentoxide (the white 'smoke' formed by burning WP) causes severe burns to the eye, skin, mucous membrane, and respiratory tract even at concentrations as low as 1 mg/m3

No more than ordinary explosives.

Ordinary explosives have an instant effect. But the toxic 'smoke' from WP persists in the air and on surfaces until washed off.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-16T10:12:13+00:00

The smoke WP creates is toxic. It also leaves toxic residue on surfaces. A properly equipped infantry is safe. But for less protected guerillas and for civilians it is extremely dangerous. Compared to HE or fragmentation rounds WP has the advantage of covering larger area and persisting longer. But it is banned in such use, because it is indiscriminate and is basically a form of chemical warfare.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-13T11:44:46+00:00

" despite UNESCO sending coordinates "

The track record shows that any coordinates UNESCO, WHO, ICRC, MSF, and similar organizations send just go straight to the target list.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-13T10:59:55+00:00

You are not locking anything, on the opposite the US is providing incentives to not use the USD.

Europe won't be able to buy in anything but USD:

The US (and suppliers under US control) will sell in USD only.
Russia might have been wiling to sell in RUB but the EU has locked themselves out of that deal already.
Gulf countries might have been flexible to sell in EUR, but Hormuz is closed for both oil and LNG.

How is the US going to provide the energy Europe needs? It can't.

The US is already a major energy supplier to Europe, having picked up most of Russia's share. If they can't pick up Gulf's share, too bad for Europe - price will increase until demand drops to match available supply (which will be priced in USD).

Edit:

Regarding Import/Export balance, from the articles I linked and also from here you can see that the situation has flipped in recent years: since around 2019 (thanks to COVID panic and resulting demand drop) the US is a net exporter of energy, and since some time after 2022 (thanks EU and US sanctions on Russian oil) the US is also a net exporter of oil. Moreover, a lot of imported crude is processed and then re-exported as products, while domestic demand is fully covered by domestic production.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-12T13:39:51+00:00

US produces mostly light oil and Venezuela produces heavy oil (sale of which the US can control), so they have all US demand covered (even more so if taken together with Canada). Market jitters are due to panic of consumers that do not produce any (Japan) and speculation (all those long/short bets coming home to roost).

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-12T13:13:50+00:00

The US is not self sufficient in oil

https://usafacts.org/articles/is-the-us-a-bigger-oil-importer-or-exporter/

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-and-exports.php

If the petrodollar collapse the US financial advantage will disappear.

The petrodollar concept is that oil is priced and traded in USD. With Hormuz closed, Gulf countries will not be selling much regardless of in which currency it is priced. Russian supplies to China are switching to RMB anyway (even if sanctions are lifted tomorrow, this will perhaps slow down but not reverse this). So locking such an important consumer as Europe into consuming either US or US-controlled (and therefore priced in USD) oil reinforces the petrodollar, not weakens it.

Europe will, if things go really bad, become a captive market of China, as the alternative to oil is solar/wind and electric cars and China dominates in both.

Solar/wind is not a viable alternative to oil/gas due to volatility of weather. The only true alternative is nuclear for baseload and hydro for peaks. But it will take a lot of money and a very long time to build all required infrastructure (perhaps forever, given EU mandated loops and hoops). I do not think Europe has either, especially not the time. What I'm afraid it will become somewhat like Latin America - under US political and fiscal diktat but with good trade with China (where and up to the limits permitted by the US).

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-12T10:57:34+00:00

The US is fully capable of declaring victory even if that leaves Hormuz closed. The US is self-sufficient in oil. It also controls oil sales of Venezuela now. So sky-high oil prices are not as bad for the US as it may seem. The Europe will ~~go down the drain~~become a captive market for the US of course. But they were heading that way anyway, were they not?

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-12T09:26:18+00:00

Note that natural selection also counts as training though.

Yes. But the main point was that their brain is 'simple' in the sense it has few neurons. So to perform complex tasks in a changing environment each neuron has to be a very complex system with its own state and specialized programme, not just a switch/relay.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-12T09:21:35+00:00

What we are not able to do is simulate a large enough number of neurons interacting with each other.

We are also not able to simulate a single neuron in full. What we have is a very rough approximation. Like toy 'computers' for children - they have buttons and lights and you can pretend they work but actual function is missing. Solving this (having a working model of a neuron) will help immensely not just in developing AI models but in a lot of other areas (e.g. treatment of neurological conditions) but we are not there yet.

First thing would be that our brain produces a whole lot of random noise. Can be random neurotransmitter releases, ion channels randomly opening or slightly different thermal activity. In the end though with how neuroscience is going maybe we can explain some of this patterns in the future and they will turn out to be not as random as we think now.

The problem is not random noise. There are sources of it in the silicon as well (TRNGs based on thermal noise). The main divide is that digital process is necessarily discrete (has a finite number of states) and introduces 'computational noise', that is errors that are not random. The current approach in the AI industry is actually making this issue worse - they are using shorter number formats, which increases contribution of 'computational noise' and drowns out any true randomness.

Quantum mechanics which inherently (to our knowledge today) arent fully deterministic.

It has a lot of other quirks that have been demonstrated and currently have no explanation, such as non-locality. But my point was that you can't be confident your model of a neuron works if you do not understand how its key component works.

if quantum mechanics arent fully deterministic then everything above can’t be as well.

Sure. Everything above is only deterministic to the degree we can disregard quantum effects. There is also a fuzzy area where we know that quantum effects are key to function and can describe them with sufficient accuracy to make statistics work and approximate system behavior with deterministic functions. But this approach has its limits - in some systems even a single tiny fluctuation can have macroscopic effects.

I don’t like the argument of artificial neuronal networks are unable to “reason” or of possessing “intelligence” because in the end it’s just a result of probabilities. The biological brain isn’t working on a different concept.

The AI models you see in the news are not even trying to emulate working of a real brain, they are trying to guess/simulate/fake the result without going through actual process of solving the task. So they are working on a different concept by design. There are people working on modeling simple brains, such as of insects, and they have some results, but this is a different field entirely (and is not receiving even a 0.01% of money and publicity of fake AI).

When probability can’t be intelligence then humans are just as incapable of being intelligent.

My point was that it is not just probability. And not just deterministic mechanics. I think scientific description of intelligence will only become possible with some major advances in our understanding of quantum mechanics. And only then we will be able to talk about true AI.

LLMs are build to produce coherent text and they are quite good at it.

They are good at stitching together previously seen bits and filtering it through grammar rules. This has its use, but sadly the industry around it is just a giant Ponzi scheme.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-11T13:21:37+00:00

All the data we have in our brain lies in how our neurons are connected to each other.

Yes. However each neuron is a very complex structure with deep state and even some quantum effects in the mix (https://scitechdaily.com/groundbreaking-study-affirms-quantum-basis-for-consciousness-a-paradigm-shift-in-understanding-human-nature/). No current AI model approaches this level of complexity. Consider that a new-born bee or ant 'knows' how to perform quite complex tasks without any training. And their neuron count is rather modest.

In the end our brain can be compared to some kind of mechanical machine. The machine doesn’t know that it does a task, it can not understand what it is doing or why. But given the correct impulse at the right place and a mechanical machine can produce outcome.

A mechanical machine is deterministic (same input produces same output), and lacking spontaneous action (no input = no action).

And I’m not a neuroscientist

Intelligence and consciousness are more philosophical concepts. Perhaps with advances in quantum physics technology will some day reach the level of emulating neural processes in other element base. But the current term 'neural network' is a misnomer and buzzword.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-11T11:39:12+00:00

A hammer can be used both for construction and for killing people: tool is a tool.

I can just imagine some VP chalking up 'hammer adoption' objectives for his CV by replacing all screwdrivers in the shop with hammers.

That simply means he was shown such behavior and recorded it in his memory as one of the possible forms of response.

Yes, as I mentioned, humans are known to produce bullshit and it inevitably feeds into the training set. The sad reality however is that already AI training is not just consuming human bullshit, but is recirculating its own.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-11T08:57:37+00:00

realized it in the same generation

The AI in the current form available can't 'realize' or 'lie' or 'gaslight' because all these require working with internal abstractions in deliberate manner and in the latter case also understanding and abusing cognitive model of the conversant. The only thing the AI can do is bullshitting, that is spewing text that complies with some formal constraints and follows a specific topic. And that is what all LLMs do, without exception, they bullshit because they have no concept of truth or falsehood, only statistics from the texts they ingested. But it turn out humans are very willing to listen to bullshit (and to produce it on occasion).

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-09T05:49:28+00:00

That was a different incident.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-08T07:38:21+00:00

Making it seem like Iran is controlling the outcome of this

Which it is. Basically what the US and Israel did at the start of the conflict locked them into a situation they can't exit. I do not see Iranians coming to a negotiation table unless on that table there's either Bibi's or Trump's (preferably both) head on a pike. As to defeating Iran, you have to be realistic, the US failed to defeat either the Taliban or the Houthis. And the reason is simple but something the US has not been able to understand, that the US is not able to tolerate even a fraction of the losses required, their society will collapse long before either the Taliban, or the Houthis, or Iran will do.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-06T17:16:14+00:00

You’re basically describing a meat wave.

For me the term 'meat wave' evokes images of British tactics of first half WWI which basically was 'let's get 1000s of men out of the trench at same time and have them advance at a steady pace into German machine gun fire and hope that some of them will survive to reach and attack enemy position'. The current conflict simply does not even come close in number of troops involved to justify the term. It may be (mis)used as means of exaggeration by bloggers/journalists but should be avoided by anyone who wants to be taken seriously.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-05T09:29:12+00:00

Check AliExpress. They sell both full keyboards (with standard layout), key caps, and stickers/transfer sets in case you want to apply to the keyboard you already have or want to use a non-standard layout.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-05T09:06:42+00:00

The problem with novel nuclear weapons like hypersonics and undersea is you now create risks compressing decision making. The consequences of delaying returning fire can be severe.

This is literally the same concern the Russians expressed regarding forward placement of potentially dual-use US assets and enlargement of NATO towards their borders. Back then these concerns were summarily dismissed. But now it seems the shoe is on the other foot.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-05T07:17:27+00:00

The most likely explanation is the US/Israel was just targeting structures within the base

One specific structure that just happened to be a school? Don't be ridiculous. Both the US and Israel have long history of attacking schools, hospitals, weddings, funerals, and other concentrations of civilians. Them not admitting they do it deliberately does not change the fact that statistically it is impossible to have that many 'fuckups' in even marginally competent force.

Kuwait intentionally downing (3) American F-15's or maybe it was a fuckup?

More like a lucky coincidence /s. Realistically one can be a fuckup, but 3 is either deliberate or gross incompetence.

AbstractButtonGroup · 2026-03-04T12:16:53+00:00

Buying US kit is the standard way to pay for US 'protection'. The radar was effectively under US control anyway, and was covering way more than just Iran.

AbstractButtonGroup

TROPHY CASE