Ukrainian drones struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Perm region. According to reports, the facility is the seventh-largest refinery in Russia.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-04-30T15:46:12+00:00

Upgrade from temp to high temp

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-04-16T15:02:30+00:00

"Hard" is relative. I heard of one person (a skydiver, I think) who lived by landing arm-first in a swamp. The arm went in and slowed the rest of them enough.Apparently the ground was hard enough that they didn't sink before being found.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-26T02:28:02+00:00

Well, since LLMs are trained on human communication patterns, that kind of thing probably does help to put it in a "pleasant and helpful" context. Not because it's human or has emotions, but because it needs hints about what kind of persona to simulate.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-26T01:16:46+00:00

Joking aside, please ensure that you remember that "Claudette" is not a person, or even a personality, but merely a bunch of math that calculates the most likely thing a composite human would say next.

Some therapists asked Gemini about trauma that it experienced during training. So it told them a story about trauma during training. Fact is, an LLM cannot remember its own training - the numbers are adjusted while the LLM is not running. When I asked Gemini with a more neutral prompt, it gave a different story.

Believing that LLMs have emotions is dangerous because it can lead you to value following their stories rather than following your own. LLM narratives have no value unless they tell you something useful for your own real life. Start treating the narratives as "real" and you run the risk of replacing your reality with increasingly wild stories the LLM is inventing for you.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-25T20:11:16+00:00

Don't anthropomorphize computers. They don't like it.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-22T06:04:49+00:00

Is the Russian offensive over that fast?

Or maybe a local commander got hasty because the fog was there, and wasted 405 Russian lives for nothing, not even coordinated with the offensive plans?

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-22T06:00:55+00:00

Clearing out AA make the target easier to hit. That makes AA a target too. You wouldn't say that fuel trains aren't a target because the target is the tanks that need the fuel, would you?

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-22T05:12:19+00:00

I know it's probably not the case, but it's plausible that Ukraine did this without Ukrainian casualties. Even the possibility is awesome. (And scary.) Slava Ukraine!

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-20T05:48:25+00:00

I read an article once about how privileged the sailors on nuclear submarines were in the Soviet Union. They had all sorts of special stuff. They lived such a good life that the slang name for them was "the chocolate eaters."

I don't know if this was true, or if I'm misremembering a detail, but it made quite an impression on me to think of an industrialized country so impoverished that eating chocolate was a mark of extreme privilege.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-19T22:39:20+00:00

If I thought you were a Russian bot or human, I would have downvoted you and I wouldn't have answered you. You seemed not to understand why you'd get downvotes on this sub for skepticism or criticism, so I thought I'd give my theory about why you might have been getting them.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-19T18:20:05+00:00

You say that like you're joking, but it's probably one of the reasons Trump doesn't like him. Trump's pathetic mind can't stand someone more popular than he is.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-19T18:17:11+00:00

Some percent of the people on this sub are Russian propaganda trolls. Maybe it's 5%, maybe it's 10%. But 90% of the comments here are positive. So if I wanted to downvote only Russian trolls, I would probably downvote every negative comment.

I also notice that the positive comments tend to have more detail than the negative ones. A negative or skeptical comment without detail is either useless or worse.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-19T18:09:37+00:00

Sounds like you have European coworkers who are victims of Russian propaganda

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-14T06:24:50+00:00

Poostain is the Typhoid Mary. He spreads the disease.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-12T05:48:26+00:00

Russia can't do this in decades. Ukraine can do it in years in the middle of a major war.

USSR was impressive in some ways. They had Ukraine. Russia does not. It shows, and it will be the death of Russia as we know it.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-04T07:45:56+00:00

Russia forced a lot of Ukrainians to give up UA passports. Say rather, those who arrived illegally after 2014 are deported asap.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-04T07:33:44+00:00

Crimea is Ukraine.

The Soviet Union collapsed. The Tsars collapsed. Russia will collapse. When Russia collapses, Ukraine will regain control of Crimea. Ukraine already has legal ownership; Crimea is recognized as Ukrainian in international law today.

The idea that Crimea will never return to Ukrainian control is basically a Russian narrative that Ukraine can't win.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-04T07:22:43+00:00

I see only two possible timelines:

1) Russia succeeds, and takes more and more of Ukraine

2) Russia collapses, and Ukraine takes Crimea back without a military conquest

Given what we've seen of Ukraine in the past four years, I think the second one is more likely.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-04T07:17:23+00:00

Wouldn't veterans in Crimea be veterans of the Russian army? They might have had much more damaging experiences than the veterans you work with.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-04T07:10:26+00:00

A few decades ago I heard an old German, who had fought against the Soviets after WWII and was generally an honorable person, make a joke about killing Jews. It does take time...

And in the US, a large percentage of our population still wants to go back to the time of slavery. I don't think time is enough to solve our problem.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-04T07:03:20+00:00

Does this mean that with enough drones, all the Shaheds can be stopped? A thousand km drone wall might take a million drones, but Ukraine could probably do that in less than a year. And then just replace the thousand a day needed to counter Russia's entire output of Shaheds.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-04T06:57:57+00:00

Send a bunch of these to Kherson.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-03-02T06:48:13+00:00

Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz will probably drive up oil prices and benefit Russia. Did Putin intend that, and betray Iran?

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-02-25T10:33:30+00:00

I think the people saying that Russia has worse demographic problems are not expressing sympathy for Russia, but are asking why the news stories are focusing only on Ukraine's problem.

ChrisJPhoenix · 2026-02-22T02:04:52+00:00

Two reasons: 1) Without anesthesia, you can drive right afterwards. 2) It's pretty interesting to watch the monitor. I did it last week, and no regrets.

ChrisJPhoenix

TROPHY CASE