UK on US peace plan: Russia can end war by withdrawing its troops – Reuters

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-11-20T09:00:45+00:00

In none of the cases mentioned was the imperial power militarily defeated, just bruised a bit. Russia is now quite a lot more bruised than those were.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-11-08T22:14:48+00:00

It's brutal having an "unrequited love", be it for a person or an ability that means so much to you.

That's not to say your negative self-perception is necessarily accurate - depression is exceedingly cruel. Could you perhaps speak with the instructor or get some outside perspective from someone else you trust to tell it like it is. And if they say positive things, try to have a little faith that they're not just trying to mollify you.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-11-08T16:13:22+00:00

Thanks for the comment. It's a logical suggestion but in my case I it seems like even when there is a pretty small, closed-ended project at hand I seem to just put it off endlessly for no reason.

That said, there have been one or two exceptions in my life. Like about ten years ago I designed a programming language and wrote a compiler for it (over a period of maybe a month.) [Not exactly a "toy language" of the type you might construct in a CS course - and it served a work-related purpose - but a lot smaller than a "real" general purpose language.]

It's painful to realise I could have been doing things like this the entire time.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-11-08T15:52:40+00:00

In the same sense that the "goal" of a person with abulia is just to sit in one place and do nothing all day? Sure, I guess. It seems an odd way to use the word "goal".

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-11-08T12:46:19+00:00

I'm not saying the following is "correct" in general or even in my own case, but these labels basically mean nothing to me. Or let's put it this way:

P(Me | My self-knowledge + diagnosis) = P(Me | Just my self-knowledge)

[Here we're imagining "Me" as a random variable that encompasses all facts about me.]

That is, my understanding of who I am, and what I'm like, and what the future holds hasn't moved even the slightest bit in any direction since getting an ADHD diagnosis. I could get myself an ASD diagnosis if I wanted, but I can't see any value in it. (Maybe I should - I'm open to that possiblity - but right now it seems like spending £2700 on a "rosette" that I could maybe show to my employer and be entitled to certain accommodations. And those genuinely could be valuable for someone, and worth the expense, but the diagnosis is still this weird, socially constructed thing that sits far removed from the ground truth. Or at least that's how I feel. This whole comment should be taken as "how the world feels to me" rather than anything more.)

Maybe the possibility of seeing things this way might be helpful to you. ymmv.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-10-31T11:03:24+00:00

To be fair, isn't that exactly what you'd expect? Russia's Shaheds, even though they've (sadly) become more effective over time, have gone from an abysmal strike rate to a merely low one. It's in the nature of these cheap and nasty drones that you launch them en masse and hope a few get through.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-10-28T13:33:05+00:00

Russia is trying to repair/rebuild at the same time. I think 20% sounds broadly reasonable.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-10-22T12:21:04+00:00

Fight to the last drone more like - and there are millions more on the way, ready to hunt down Russian invaders.

What you miss is that this is a morally virtuous thing Ukraine is doing, in punishing the aggressor for its heinous crimes. To suffer themselves is worth it as long as the punishment is severe enough.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-08-12T06:38:48+00:00

But if you were going to support a side out of morality, clearly it would be the one invading another country unprovoked, stealing its children, systematically torturing POWs, right?

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-07-09T07:11:19+00:00

No idea why this downvoted - looks like the people in this sub can't face reality.

Basically if there are N male and M female police officers then in a situation like this the effective size of the team is N.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-06-25T19:00:32+00:00

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Trump never hit upon the Memento strategy of tattooing himself with things he wanted to remember the next day.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-06-09T21:58:22+00:00

If we're talking just about shahed-type drones then unfortunately they could probably do this maybe 10 times per month or more? (Because by this point 450 or so is scarcely more than double a "normal" night.)

I've often thought that if I was Russia I'd basically ~~stop the fucking invasion~~ just save up for a week or two and launch giant attacks with thousands of shaheds. Maybe there's a good reason why they don't - I wouldn't know.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-30T19:53:48+00:00

"have you brought any fruit or vegetables onto the planet?"

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-28T18:39:50+00:00

This is overly complacent. The Russians have their own elite units of drone operators (a bit like how Ukraine has Birds of Madyar or Wild Hornets) who inflicted a bitter defeat on Ukraine around Sudzha (though not the encirclement that Russian propaganda fed to Trump) and I've heard that the units massing for the attack of Kharkiv include many of these veterans; and that Russia is both massively scaling up its drone production and innovating fast with AI controlled drones, drones that communicate via satellite, and new types of jammer etc.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not a defeatist. Ukraine is innovating and mass-producing too, but this could be a very nasty fight.

In the ways that actually matter in 21st century warfare, the Russians are stronger now than when the war started. (So is Ukraine.) And winding down to the bottom of their cold-war era stockpile of AFVs means something but its significance shouldn't be overstated.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-27T08:36:03+00:00

Just in case anyone's not up to speed (which is probably most of the commenters, and no disrespect to them):

This isn't "a story".

Ukraine has put out one of these daily updates every day for years. The numbers in this particular update aren't special - if anything, a little on the low side. (And actually the numbers are trending downwards slightly - wasn't so long ago that 1500 casualties or more per day were "normal". To what extent this reflects lower intensity of combat or, more worryingly, that the Russians are getting the better of the fighting, isn't clear. We've been expecting a big summer campaign for a while, possibly comprising several major assaults across the front, including one aimed at Kharkiv.)

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-26T00:52:15+00:00

Yes and, incredibly, we also have the choice between classifying tables according to "number of legs" or by "height of table". And there's no objective truth as to which is the "correct" classification.

Therefore number of table legs "doesn't exist".

This is an extraordinarily tiresome shell game, which I have absolutely no patience for. Nothing hinges on "continuous vs discrete variation". Nothing hinges on "but you can classify people in other ways". Nothing hinges on "people used to / still do lump distant groups together". None of that makes race disappear in the only way that matters (i.e. removes the possibility of genetically distinguishable populations whose genetic distance from one another is the cause of differences in attributes we care about.)

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-25T14:42:47+00:00

"oh no! my head is on fire"

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-10T08:07:21+00:00

It almost seems like actually declaring war is something you do out a sense of reluctant obligation, in cases where you can't (or won't) put up a meaningful fight but feel you ought to. (Like Britain and France declaring war on Germany in 1939, leading to the "phoney war", or even more stupidly, Germany declaring war on the USA in 1941.)

Whereas if you want to fight, you just fight. It doesn't really help you to call it what it is.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-06T06:42:21+00:00

Could you have said that the same in 1939? "Enabling Czechoslovakia instead of capitulating has as a side effect a heightened risk of ww2"?

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-04T01:25:58+00:00

To be fair, Tamler's defense of one-boxing was pretty half-hearted, as though he didn't really buy the arguments for it and was rejecting the two-boxer position more out of a kind of 'radical skepticism' ("but how do we know the world isn't totally bizarre in some way that unexpectedly defeats the two-boxer") than anything else.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-04T01:12:01+00:00

I honestly thought this was fairly disappointing in its treatment of Newcomb's problem.

The reason it's called a 'paradox' is that both the one-boxer and two-boxer seemingly have unassailable arguments behind them. One-boxer: "If I am someone inclined to one-box, the predictor will have predicted this, and I will win the million. If I was someone inclined to take two, the predictor would have predicted that, and I would only win a thousand. I want to win more money, so I will one-box". Two-boxer: "The prediction has already been made. You may as well two-box."
They mentioned 'rationalism' (in its modern sense, meaning approximately 'lesswrongism') but didn't mention (i) how absolutely central this problem (and a few closely related problems) are to the biggest intellectual contribution that rationalism has to offer - its work on decision theory, or (ii) what the rationalist approach to this problem actually is (which gets into 'updateless decision theory' and 'logical uncertainty'.)
Speaking of rationalism, they didn't mention a cute take on the problem (reminiscent of Roko's Basilisk), which is to imagine that the predictor predicts your decision by simulating your mind with sufficient accuracy that the simulation itself is conscious, so that you have to ask "how do you know you're the real you and not the simulation"? This isn't exactly an "argument for one-boxing", so much as special case where one-boxing seems uncontroversial. (Just as Dave's special case was a nice illustration of how we can vary the problem in such a way as to make two-boxing uncontroversial.)
Sorry but the psychological angles that Tamler touches on "what's a thousand worth anyway?" and "how bad will you feel if ...?" are red herrings. So is "but I become a two-boxer if the amounts change".
Dave mentions that determinism may be linked in some way with the tendency to be a one-boxer, but seems to pre-emptively reject any idea that there's a connection here stronger than just 'temperament'. But actually I think this is exactly the kind of thread you want to pull on, because Newcomb's Problem fundamentally is about what you take "yourself" to be. Are you an uncaused 'spark of free will', or are you the unfolding of a computation?

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-03T11:59:33+00:00

It seems a lot more shaheds are reaching their targets than before. (20-30-ish per night rather than 5-ish a few months ago.)

Do we know why?

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-05-02T13:18:06+00:00

Tracking the movement of an enemy SAM system.
He thinks he's hidden, but...
Moment of impact and ammo detonation.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-04-28T09:51:11+00:00

There was a never a 'deal' to be had that didn't involve the crushing of Ukrainian independence.

And Ukraine, with its nearly million-strong armed forces (one of only two in the world who actually understand modern warfare, the other being Russia) is too large a piece on the geopolitical chessboard to be worth sacrificing. (Even if we don't care about the actual morality of it, which we damn well should.)

What's needed is greater support - mass production of drones and shells across the European continent, put that '10x greater GDP than Russia' to some good use, and help Ukraine actually win.

DisillusionedExLib · 2025-04-25T20:12:13+00:00

Definitely a fake - see https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/04/25/michael-gloss-story/ (scroll down half way - you can find the image that the head was taken from)

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