I don't disagree, but I have never understood why Putin attacked in 2022 and not in 2016-2020. The original war in Ukraine started in 2014.
My best guess is, he thought he could rig an election or corrupt Zelensky and only invaded when that didn't work. And maybe he was confident Trump would win a second term.
He might have also been doubting the possibility of Trump winning in 2024 and he saw Ukraine getting stronger and integrating with the West day by day.
Thing is, his real goal is to fuck up that alliance.
Trump has been compromised by the Russians ever since they bailed him out in the 90s. He is actively dismantling American global power, just in a way that is wrapped in a US flag so that the voters don't realize it.
I fully agree and in typical American fashion, affirmative action and DEI were just bandaids to quickly solve some of the effects of institutional discrimination, instead of solving it at the root.
Even I, as a very progressive person, don't like some DEI hires. But the actual problematic DEI hires are not talented people like Kamala Harris. They are connected incompetent people.
I think Clarence Thomas would be a good example. By most accounts he is the most corrupt and incompetent justice, who just happened to run in the right conservative circles.
In the business world, I also see quite a lot of well-connected incompetent people. It used to be white gulf buddies, now it tends to be the white sister-of, or the latina wife-of, the gulf buddy.
Maybe the Trump kids are the best example of DEI hires. Ivanka Trump, anyone?
"All" is stretching it, but I think TikTok and the fediverse have definitely attracted significant portions of the progressive left.
What remains on reddit is mostly the liberal left and a few progressives in niche subs.
But if you go to a sub such as r/worldnews, it's clear that there are no actual progressives commenting on that sub. They either got banned or they left.
Extra funds are only useful if they can provide a competitive advantage.
Otherwise those investments will not have a positive ROI.
The case until now was built on the premise that US tech was years ahead and that AI had a strong moat due to high computer requirements for AI.
We now know that that isn't true.
If high compute enables a significant improvement in AI, then that old case could become true again. But the prospects of such a reality happening and staying just got a big hit.
I think we are in for a dot-com type bubble burst, but it will take a few weeks to see if that's gonna happen or not.
Climate change has a relatively cheap and easy solution.
Aresol sprays can buy a few decades of time if things get too hot.
We already have cheap solar and cheap batteries are becoming a reality. We only need a cheap, non-intermittent energy source to provide baseload energy.
Cheap nuclear power is possible and can fill that niche - we had the tech in the past and China has it today.
For about $1T a fleet of reactors could be built to extract all the excess carbon from the atmosphere in 50 years, working in tandem with cheap solar energy and cheap batteries to power human civilization.
There could be some trickery on the training side, i.e. maybe they spent way more than $6M to train it.
But it is clear that they did it without access to the infra that big tech has.
And on the run side, we can all verify how well it runs and people are also running it locally without internet access. There is no trickery there.
They are 20x cheaper than OpenAI if you run it on their servers and if you run it yourself, you only need a small investment in relatively affordable servers.
True, but training is one-off. And as you say, a factor 100x less costs with this new model. Therefore NVidia just saw 99% of their expected future demand for AI chips evaporate
Even if they are lying and used more compute, it's obvious they managed to train it without access to the large amounts of the highest end chips due to export controls.
Conservatively, I think NVidia is definitely going to have to scale down by 50% and they will have to reduce prices by a lot, too, since VC and government billions will no longer be available to their customers.
Because the silicon valley bros had convinced the national security wonks in the Beltway that it was paramount for national security, technological leadership and economic prosperity.
I think this will go down as the biggest grift in history.
Kevin Walmsley reported on Deepseek 10 days ago. Last week, the smart money exited big tech. This week the panic starts.
I'm getting big dot-com 2.0 vibes from all of this.
It is, but it's also a very efficient and difficult to evade tax.
For many EU countries the VAT revenue is equal or larger than the income tax revenue.
Most Europeans don't mind it. You can control your spending, so VAT doesn't hit us in inconvenient ways, like for example, taxes on cars and property.
European countries compensate poor people with good social programs. So in the end, poor people are getting more benefits than the VAT they pay.
Billions have already been spent on building chip fabs which will never be profitable.
Yes, China is doing the US taxpayer a solid by giving them an opportunity to prevent losing money on AI, but I think this administration is going to find a way to send those billions to silicon valley anyway.
I personally think that moment was in 1993, when the Encarta CD was released.
It had a huge amount of information, but it didn't feel overwhelming.
The internet also didn't feel overwhelming.
In 2005, I think the internet already felt overwhelming.
But I guess if you weren't the nerdy type crawling the web, then social media and smartphones were the game changer and I would put the date closer to 2010.
I don't disagree, but I have never understood why Putin attacked in 2022 and not in 2016-2020. The original war in Ukraine started in 2014.
My best guess is, he thought he could rig an election or corrupt Zelensky and only invaded when that didn't work. And maybe he was confident Trump would win a second term.
He might have also been doubting the possibility of Trump winning in 2024 and he saw Ukraine getting stronger and integrating with the West day by day.