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  • Ukraine is no less European than Norway or the UK

    I think in the context of Europe sure, in the context of integration into the wider Western European ecosystem no.

    If Russia had invaded Norway or the UK NATO would have been engaged from minute 1 and Russians would have been exterminated like cockroaches on day 1

    Poles and the Baltics have been shouting “you’re idiots” from the top of their lungs, we ignored them, considered their shouting to be the result of PTSD. Which yes I mean it is but also they were right.

    Yep there were plenty of warning signs, and this is probably one of the few times (as much as it fucking kills me to say it) that Trump has been spot on:

    Word for Word: President Trump Strongly Criticized Germany at Start of NATO Summit (C-SPAN) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXqZf72pAhk

    If a fucking moron like Trump can spot a problem (and end up being right about it) then I think the EU is making some serious mistakes.

    EU may consider replacing Russian LNG imports with those from US, von der Leyen says November 9, 2024

    https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-may-consider-replacing-russian-lng-imports-with-those-us-von-der-leyen-says-2024-11-08/

    This is a joke

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  • tbh Ukraine was almost in a different era before Euromaidan, once they did that it cemented them as pro-west not potentially pro-west, and it's unfortunate that as soon as it cemented it was moving away from Russia it was attacked by it, this timing was precise by Putin, it leaves it open to the fact that Ukraine hasn't had enough time to fully integrate into the EU meaning that Europe doesn't see it as one of its own, in the same way an attack on Italy would be seen.

    For those who haven't seen this is a bit exaggerated American style but still really good movie:

    Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom | Full Feature | Netflix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzNxLzFfR5w

  • the people of sydney are genociding people? that’d be news to the people of sydney

  • who didn’t read the article 🫵

  • Me every time I have to read about Trump :(

  • Yep I rate Melbournes trams quite hard, they helped us out when we were down there for the formula1 twice, we walked 99% of the time except at the end when we were literally too tired to walk anymore!

    Melbourne doesn’t have a train to the Airport either (currently) and all attempts are receiving severe political roadblocks.

    Ridiculous!

  • I don't see any mass migration to PT without the infra changes along with it, Brisbane doesn't even have a cheap train to the airport and when I have to catch a train to the city for work my trip time doubles compared to my motorbike and I still have to use my car to get to the station... and that's assuming I'm not 1 minute late and miss the train so then you have to add another 30 minute wait in :( ... but at least we are getting some improvements with cross river rail.

    At the moment the best bet that I can see to reduce co2 emissions is to encourage EV adoption because at least it is something familiar to people and until the infra changes required to make the place a '15 minute city' come along it's the best chance we have to reduce co2.

  • due to the extra weight of the battery.

    They're working on it:

    SAIC-owned IM Motors currently offers its L6 saloon with a semi-solid-state battery – a halfway house to a full-solid-state battery that uses a more viscous, gel-like electrolyte than the liquid in a lithium ion cell.

    This pack allows an extra 33kWh of battery capacity to be crammed into the same space as an equivalent lithium ion pack. That equates to a 28% improvement in the car’s range to a total of 621 miles (1000KM), according to Chinese homologation testing.

    https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/technology/solid-state-battery-round-2025-be-decisive-year

    At 1000KM of range we are already within the space of 10 years of EV's hitting the mainstream reaching beyond what petrol cars can do which will allow for smaller batteries that are lighter for cars, and that's with a semi-solid state battery, not a full one!

    In addition to the weight reduction they're also working on reducing the amount of critical minerals in batteries and reducing the chance of fire and increasing the range and improving the charge times.

  • Yep those OG passively/air cooled batteries really have done a dent in the reputation for battery lifespan, hopefully over the next 10 years as more people understand that we've been on actively/water cooled batteries for like 10 years now that the lifespan degradation is much slower

    https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/details/2018-hyundai-ioniq-electric-elite-auto-my19/SSE-AD-18401866/

    7 year old EV with just 24KM range loss

    EV's have come a long way in a very short time, just like how big of an impact solar is having some people haven't kept up

  • I get what you’re saying, but by the same logic, anything that encourages adoption of EVs (or continued use of petrol/diesel vehicles) is bad because it ultimately encourages less people to just use PT

    I'm not necessarily encouraging adoption of EV's but I'm definitely against making petrol cars cheaper to run... although I do argue for far cheaper electricity rates which will increase EV adoption and ultimately reduce co2 which is my ultimate goal

    I'm also not 100% sure encouraging people to use PT has any effect, people use cars because they allow you to go to anywhere you want at any time of the day or night or public holidays or unions in sydney striking etc right from your front door, PT cannot compete with this especially in Australia where everything is so far apart

    You can encourage it but I think there are limits on how far it can go without changing our cities completely around and by that point there's not much need to encourage, people will give up their cars ev or ice willingly

  • It reduces co2 output and for me that's the most important thing at the moment especially here in Australia where everything is built around cars

  • For me anything that helps out petrol car drivers is bad as it inadvertently encourages less people to move to EV's

    but good for people who still drive petrol drinkers

  • You ever worked in an average corporate job? You're missing out on so much

    The IT guys barely know Windows, they've most likely never even heard of Ubuntu, could you imagine such a thing :|

  • wasn’t the impact on kids minimal?

    https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2023/10/children-covid.html?t

    “For almost every infectious disease, the most vulnerable populations are at the extremes of age — the very young and the very old,” said Stanford Medicine professor of microbiology and immunology and of pathology Bali Pulendran, PhD. “But with COVID-19, the young are spared while the old are emphatically not. That’s been a mystery.”

  • Like declaring murder against trans people for being born transgender

    was dawkins suggesting this in his opinion piece and if not then why remove it

  • And if you don’t always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.

    When did the web ever present itself as a completely factual and never wrong? There's plenty of evidence of wikipedia being wrong on wikipedia

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia

    Do I get things wrong? Sure, never said I was perfect either, if someone tells me I got a stat or a figure or something wrong, great!

    The question for me is: is it wrong enough to make the results completely unreliable, and the answer to that is no, more often than not it provides accurate information.

    If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web!

    That's not accurate to me, AI/SEO search results are still a minority of results that I get, most of the time I get close to what I'm looking for, but AI search summarisation is essentially the next level of search for me:

    Dogpile/Altavista/AskJeeves > Google > AI powered search summarisation

    I get essentially what I'm looking for directly, why click on a page with 47 ads, a video pop up or something else when all I'm looking for is:

    https://www.perplexity.ai/search/do-you-have-a-basic-egg-on-toa-pkpsq9WwSMm5G8ICsmDnbw#0

    Is it a complete replacement? Not yet, Ecosia is still my daily driver having used it 25,000+ times in the last year but AI is making a serious dent in how often I use it.

    we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.

    I would keep an eye on that, the gains in AI have been massive in the last few years, and we're starting to potentially see a turning point with DeepSeekv3 being created on a fraction of the cost and power of other models

    DeepSeek (Chinese AI co) making it look easy today with an open weights release of a frontier-grade LLM trained on a joke of a budget (2048 GPUs for 2 months, $6M).

    For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16K GPUs...

    https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/deepseeks-new-ai-model-appears-to-be-one-of-the-best-open-challengers-yet/

    *This could turn out to be wrong hence why I'm keeping an eye on it **I'm absolutely certain a whole lot of execs are stunned right now they're spending billions when something that cost millions came up right next to them

  • Okay, but then, why is AI useful? If you’re going to look at sources anyway, what’s the point?

    Because it summarises the results, it's like a search engine but better

    The rest? It’s wasteful and it won’t last.

    I'm using it for coding in a way that it isn't going anywhere, I'm using LM Studio with Qwen2.5 Coder and Mistral 7b, these are offline models so even if Alibaba or Mistral go broke they'll continue to work.

    Example of what it looks like:

    It seems like lots of people are using it in a similar way, no longer searching the web and clicking on sometimes 100 results trying to figure out a problem but instead using AI to answer questions:

    While originally it was constantly making mistakes there's now Chain of Thought and code sandboxing, it has gotten so much better so quickly

    So now I've got: web search summarisation, a far better reddit/forum search and summarisation, text to image generation and personal coding assistant, each of these in and of themselves would be an amazing program used by millions and that's ignoring using it for assistance with language learning:

    https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/

    song making

    https://suno.com/explore

    etcetc

    If it wasn't for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I've seen since the iphone.

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  • Well good news for Putin I guess, thanks to his stupidity NATO membership increased in size with Sweden and Finland joining and lots of other countries also looking at joining for protection from... Russia

    He could have integrated Russia more deeply into Europe, with the gas pipelines and supply of energy, France/Macron was constantly saying that Russia should be more integrated into the EU... but then he did this and now I doubt in my lifetime we'll see Russia be anything more than a pariah state