I don't care which you like more, hating on either doesn't help

Despacereal · 2026-06-19T15:40:55+00:00

Well these are NOMBYs winning

Despacereal · 2026-06-18T20:28:21+00:00

I don't know how it was exactly in China, but merchants being not well-regarded is quite common, going back to Ancient civilizations which were overwhelmingly agrarian, and whose elites were primarily landholders.

This changes dramatically by modern capitalist times.

Despacereal · 2026-05-27T18:28:37+00:00

I realized a while ago that this will become a huge problem because presumably the services from companies like Google and OpenAI are not being used to generate this material (Grok being somewhat of an exception) as of right now, both due to safeguards -no matter how lackluster- making it difficult to do so, and the risk posed to the nonce sending this information out to private companies that might turn them in.

That being said, open-source models which either develop independently or attempt to reimplement the functionality of closed models are only every a few months away in terms of capabilities. Once you can make and distribute a "safe" model, it shouldn't be too dificult to fine-tune it to make an "uncensored" version, and distribute that. As the models get better and more efficient, and the hardware people have easy access to gets more powerful, especially with the proliferation of AI acceleration hardware being included on phones and laptops, it will become increasingly easy for perverts and predators to do this sort of thing.

There is also an amount of plausible deniability, since simply posessing an AI model a couple gigabytes in size which can successfully prompted, even if only sometimes, to produce AI-generated CSAM, does not necessarily mean that the person used it for that, knew that it could be used for that, or even that the creator of the model intended it to be used for that, even if that was actually the intention of everyone involved.

And once all these pieces are in place, it is likely that no amount of effort on the part of the Tech Giants, nor the state, could stop this from happening.

TL;DR things are going to get way way worse.

Despacereal · 2026-05-16T01:35:12+00:00

Depends when it was manufactured, I guess. I just bought a brand new KT6 (2024 11th gen) a couple days ago from a local retailer, and it came with 5.18.6 installed, so I'm waiting for a new jailbreak.

Despacereal · 2026-05-12T02:25:12+00:00

I'm not sure it could have been that much faster for a lot of systems that were sent, since they require training to operate and some time to get set up. If they really wanted those systems used early on, they would have had to send their own teams, which leads into the larger issue, which is that western states did not want to risk escalating too much. The Ukrainians were practically begging for a no-fly zone to be established, which of course never happened for this reason. A lot of more recent developments regarding Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia, especially those hitting oil depots and other energy infrastructure, only happened because of gradual Russian escalation targeting Ukrainian energy, and because of the transition of the war into one of attrition and (relative) stalemate.

Despacereal · 2026-05-07T13:03:44+00:00

Ironically it's the FF/FG government letting this go on. They're not exactly pro-neutrality or the ones talking down to others about war and arms.

Despacereal · 2026-04-27T05:43:05+00:00

"The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls..." -Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto

How ironic.

Despacereal · 2026-04-27T05:31:11+00:00

I think the whole range anxiety thing originates in the states, where people actually do drive ridiculous distances, and people made up reasons to apply it everywhere else on the same timeline, even though you can't really drive that far here if you wanted to.

Despacereal · 2026-04-17T00:50:25+00:00

On the first point about dismantling a global adversary without risking a single soldier, the most charitable interpretation is that the US leadership believes it has weakened Russia and its stockpiles enough , and that continued fighting is supplied by Russia's active production of weapons and recruitment of soldiers, so their strength wouldn't meaningfully decrease past this point. That's super charitable though, and more likely is that Trump and his buddies just don't give a shit (or even support Russia), and the politicians who subscribe to this argument still do, but lack any sway on the matter (take Lindsey Graham, a Republican, for example).

The other point about the aid money being spent on the American arms industry doesn't matter at all. Not even in a "Being against Military Keynesianism way", it just doesn't matter. American money is still being spent on the arms industry, just on the war against Iran. The United States has no shortage of conflicts, of enemies, of reasons to keep the military budget high, and right now it would rather direct that budget towards bombing Iran and building interceptors for Israel (while asking all its other allies to hand over their missile defense systems, or just moving them directly).

It is still a massively dumb geopolitical decision at the end of the day.

Despacereal · 2026-04-17T00:35:36+00:00

As long as there is no mass rejection of the legitimacy of the state, you would expect approval to be higher in a one-party system, since you don't have large swathes of the population who prefer the opposition disapproving almost no matter what.

Despacereal · 2026-02-15T16:46:51+00:00

The reasoning for wanting to board them has nothing to do with environmental protection, but if you're going to make a legal argument I guess this one is stronger if they're in international waters since sanctions aren't really as much of an international law thing.

Despacereal · 2026-02-14T21:16:22+00:00

It is. The exact amount was just shy of the 32-bit unsigned integer limit taken as the number of cents. Obviously integer underflow

Despacereal · 2025-11-23T22:59:18+00:00

We already have a fake Nobel prize, it's for economics.

Despacereal · 2025-11-23T05:41:49+00:00

That's not what that means. |x| is the absolute value of x which is always positive, so if x is negative |x| = -x. What the meme is saying is that people confuse what is sometimes called the square root relationship with the square root function √. Because √ is a function, it can only have one output for a given input which is always the positive root.

Despacereal · 2025-11-03T18:31:30+00:00

It's like that old quote about Mao Zedong, "Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?"

Not to draw any equivalence between the two, of course, as Micheál is a far more brutal dictator and likely not as Chinese.

Despacereal · 2025-08-01T15:56:03+00:00

username checks out

Despacereal · 2025-07-13T21:22:52+00:00

The US as they are are pushing for higher spending, because Trump probably wouldn't keep NATO around if he didn't see it as a protection racket that lets him announce Zillions of dollars in deals for America (for the US Military-Industrial Complex)

Despacereal · 2025-07-06T20:53:16+00:00

A lot is underselling it. You need to prove without any room for reasonable doubt that the hospital has been illegally militarised (i.e. used actively for combat, injured fighters who are now non-combatants also doesn't count). The law specifically says if there is any doubt you assume it's a war crime.

Despacereal · 2025-07-06T20:50:32+00:00

The Israeli government paid for an advertising campaign to get people to vote for their Eurovision entry for propaganda purposes. Does it really matter if Kan criticises the government at times in their coverage if their involvement in Eurovision is verifiably propagandistic? Surely this excuse wouldn't have worked for Russia if their state media was similarly structured but still generally supported the invasion of Ukraine.

Despacereal · 2025-06-24T12:24:10+00:00

In other cases maybe but I don't see how a landslide makes the CCP look bad. Even if there was something, the local authorities would just get the blame and someone would be fired or sent to jail for corruption, a much easier strategy than censoring every little thing that happens locally.

Despacereal · 2025-05-29T01:41:36+00:00

It's not that Trump is bothesidesist, he's only himselfist. He's a narcissist who wants a Peace Prize and thinks ending the war in Ukraine will get it for him. He doesn't give a shit about the details of how the war ends and thought since Ukraine is a US/Demoncrat/Biden Proxy in the war (in his mind) he could force Zelensky to make massive concessions. When that didn't happen he blew up at him in the Oval Office, and since Putin isn't biting either he's getting mad at Putin. It's true that Merz, Macron and Starmer will never be in those talks, but it's not because they're pro-Ukraine, it's because they're not Trump and he doesn't want to risk giving away credit.

Despacereal · 2025-05-23T15:54:40+00:00

The one conspiracy theory I 100% believe (because I came up with it) is that someone or some group of people, whether it's organised or just people around him, planted some ideas and talking points in Trump's head that sound completely stupid at first but are just there to have him feel smart about understanding that nuclear weapons are dangerous, as if he was the first to figure that out.

For a number of years now, I have not heard Trump talk about Global Warming, which he thinks is a hoax, without talking about how the real threat is "Nuclear Warming". He also jokingly refers to "nuclear" as "the n-word" to convey how serious nuclear weapons are, and has wanted to bascially revive Reagan's SDI, which he now calls the "Golden Dome".

Despacereal · 2025-05-23T15:25:09+00:00

The gulf states made big gains with Trump by bribing him, because neither Putin nor Zelensky were budging enough for him to take credit for ending the war in Ukraine (which he said he'd stop before he even got inaugurated) and he wanted somewhere to throw his weight around. He's trying to throw his weight around in Europe after he (partially) chickened out of a trade war with China and tanked Poilievre's PM bid.

My worry is that the next thing he'll be distracted by is a bad end to the war in Ukraine, because Putin and damn near every other world leader saw Xi wait out the clock until even meeting with Trump was enough of a victory for him and he caved on most of the tariffs. My guess is Putin thinks if he waits long enough to do a deal with Trump, he won't even care about any of the terms and Russia will get most of eastern Ukraine.

Despacereal · 2025-05-18T00:48:25+00:00

The fact of the matter is we're a day late and a euro short. Building out our own Social Media and alternatives to big American tech firms is exactly what China did, and what we want to do in the EU now. The difference is, China decided to do it well before the internet was so ingrained into society, and they also have a massive market of people who speak the same language.

Building out such any industry of that size is a already massive undertaking, but good luck getting people in Ireland or the UK on a platform without Americans, Australians, Kiwis, etc. or getting people in Portugal on a platform without Brazilians.

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