Voroxpete @ Voroxpete @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

This has been building for a while. We've seen Trump slowly start to criticise Putin more and more. And the reason is simple; Putin is making him look bad.

Ending the war in Ukraine was a key promise of Trump's campaign. He cast the Dems as ignorant bloodthirsty warmongers who only knew how to shovel money into the death machine, while he was the savvy deal maker who would end the war in a day.

One of Trump's biggest problems is that he buys his own hype. I think he really did believe that Ukraine was only an ongoing issue because no one had really tried to sit down and hash out a deal with Russia. And of course, with his cozy relationship with Putin, he was just the guy to do it.

But there is no deal to be made. The things Ukraine wants and the things Russia wants are fundamentally incompatible. There's no middle ground between "I want to exist" and "I want for you not to exist." And Putin's claims of wanting to come to the table have only ever been a smoke screen.

So now Trump looks like a fucking moron because the "easy" deal he claimed he'd get isn't happening, and Putin keeps on thumbing his nose at the US by flagrantly violating every agreement he makes.

For Putin, pissing off Trump doesn't matter. He's already got what he needs out of him. Trump was only ever a Russian asset in the sense that they knew that getting him into power would accelerate the USA's decline. They're not calling up and sending him orders every day. They don't need to. As another commenter here brilliantly put it, "Trump is a fire-and-forget idiot."

But there's at least some hope that this break with Putin might see him turn to supporting Ukraine purely out of spite. He's done pettier things for less reason.

Using self-hosting services enables me to accomplish tasks more quickly.

As opposed to what? Using a cloud SaaS alternative, or not having that service at all?

People who influence my behavior think that I should use cloud services.

This question is going to get bad data. No one likes to think of themselves as being influenced. A more effective phrasing would be "...people I trust..."

If you divide the data into red states and blue states, you'll see that police killings have fallen in blue states, but risen in red states.

No one. They're not planning to sell them, they're planning to use them.

Nazi Germany made a lot of tanks too, and they weren't exactly looking to be the world's arms dealer.

The continuation of the Mr Mayonnaise saga that we've all been waiting for.

And you're just going to comply with that?

I for one would still want to call out whats being done, to make a record for future generations if nothing else.

Are you really such a good little soldier that the supreme court makes a bad decision and you immediately reorient your entire moral framework to match?

Listen, if any branch of science is going to crack immortality, it's the mycologists, 100%. Mushrooms are really, really, really fucking weird.

This was a triumph...

Autarky.

That's the four dollar word for when a nation closes off all forms of outside trade and supplies all its own needs internally.

It doesn't work.

And it's a core tenet of fascism.

The reason why autarky appeals is because an autarkic nation can freely engage in hostilities with anyone they want to, without fear, because they don't depend on anyone else for anything. See Nazi Germany.

It's an incredibly stupid notion. While unrestricted free trade is not by any means good, some amount of trade is simply far more effective and efficient than trying to be an island. And trade is an excellent means of extending soft power.

Trump hates soft power. He doesn't understand it, so it's bad. To him, hard power is the only thing that matters. Being the biggest, the strongest, the toughest. It's the politics of a bully. He wants an army with a nation attached, endlessly manufacturing weapons, food and medicine to supply the troops as they goose-step across the world.

Remember, this is all about OpenAI convincing investors to shovel more money into their furnace.

They are not profitable. They have no realistic path to being profitable. Their only hope for survival is to South Seas Company their through round after round of investor funding. And to do that they have to create the appearance of near unlimited demand for their services, and therefore for additional capacity to run those services.

The writing is on the wall. Microsoft and Amazon, two of the biggest players in the compute space, both of which also run their own AI projects, have both massively scaled back their plans for future compute expansion. If anyone should be building out like crazy it's them. If anyone has a clear idea of what the actual demand is, it's them. If Amazon and Microsoft are out, this thing is fucked.

OpenAI is fucked. Sam Altman knows it. But if he can keep the illusion going, the money train doesn't have to stop. Yet.

I'm actually OK with games costing a bit more to sell if they cost a lot to make; god knows, the devs deserve to get paid properly. But, one, that money won't actually make it to the devs, and two, any time Randy Pitchford is for something it's really hard not to automatically be against it, on the assumption that he's so consistently wrong about everything, and just such an unbelievable piece of shit, that just assuming he's in the wrong is the safest bet.

Seriously, why do they let him talk? The man is a walking PR disaster.

Then again, we should all be asking how the hell he's not in jail for possession of child porn, so I guess this is a pretty minor thing in comparison.

Because of course he wouldn't pay up. The man could literally afford to take more money than any one person could ever spend in their life, put it in a pile and set it on fire, and not be any more than a fraction of a percent poorer, but he's still such an unfathomably awful cunt that he just has to stiff people anyway.

I actually think that in Israel's case, threats are the only option left. The world has been trying far too much subtle diplomacy with them.

This is what Biden could have done. Threaten to cut off all aid until the genocide stops. The option was always there.

It's very much a stopped clock scenario of course. Trump is being the same bull headed idiot he always is, this just happens to be the one time that's appropriate.

And it won't matter because he'll fold like a cheap suit. He's all bark, no bite.

Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, calibre-web for ebooks. Don't try to get it to get one thing that does both well, you're better off with two solutions that are both better at their respective thing.

Please give this game a try, it really is a lot of fun. They've come up with some really uniwue gameplay that feels unlike anything else out there, and their understanding of the setting is spot on.

Also because cars create a huge number of negative externalities that impose additional costs on society as a whole. Pollution, climate damage, accidents, wear and tear on roads and other infrastructure, increased public transit costs because transit has to contend with traffic, etc. As someone who does drive, I absolutely should be made to pay for those costs.

They don't know. I've talked to Albertans about this, and when you actually ask them what they're mad about, they struggle to answer. They've grown up being taught that everyone else in Canada is fucking over their province, to the point where the actual specifics don't even matter. It's just an article of faith.