Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.
There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.
Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.
Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.
Let's hold this comment until after the mid-terms. The biggest thing Americans can do to stop Trump's war mongering would be at the ballot box. Protesting is one thing, but actively voting in people with power to stop POTUS would be the most direct action they can take.
The majority of people don’t really care about the world, their country, etc.
They just care that they have what they need, that they don’t struggle too much in life.
In the US people will vote for whoever will make their life easier. To some degree there is morality/ethics/ideology but that’s usually grounded in something that effects you day-to-day
Examples from republicans: Keep out the immigrants or you won’t have a job. You don’t want trans people in the bathroom with your kid. Democrats are socialists which is morally repugnant (and will raise your taxes!)
From dems: republicans are trying to control women (reproductive rights), republicans will cut social programs, etc.
Nobody _really_ cares about wars in Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, etc aside from it effecting them at home.
(Really caring would involve donating, protesting, volunteering, etc — plenty of people talk/have opinions)
Often, both are true. It's perfectly legitimate for anyone (Russian or otherwise) to have geo-political concerns (e.g. NATO expansion, Cuban missile crisis etc), but a Russian concerned about NATO expansion may also be very opposed to the extreme option of war as a solution.
War affects an ordinary Russian in very negative ways: the possibility of conscription (w/ risk of injury/death), complications for travel, sanctions on goods and services, and the economic opportunity cost (money wasted on war that could have gone to productive uses, plus reduced economic output due to drone strikes on yandex, wildberries, refineries).
Russia could fully integrate into EU/NATO if it really wanted.
That's just not compatible with ambitions of its corrupt leaders who want to be a root-level player, not "one of NATO countries". And I'm not sure how legitimate is prioritization of wants of corrupt leaders over well-being of your compatriots.
NATO is not something you can just apply to on a whim. The path for a membership was there: e.g. there were some joint exercises, etc. Obviously they also need political integration as well.
Russia actually have been a member of Council of Europe (PACE, etc.) since 1996 but it was expelled in 2022. If they had a good record in Council of Europe they could really go for NATO membership eventually.
Ok, about the path you describe: how can one join a military exercise without a prior green light for that? And speaking about the political integration: remember that Turkey is in nato, so it does not need more political integration than Russia had in early 2000th.
What happened is that nato realized that if Russia joins, it will loose the reason to exist (i.e. if the old enemy joins the alliance what is the need for such an alliance anymore?)
So nato bureaucrats understood that they will loose well-paying positions and rejected even initial talks.
I think you misunderstood me, Russia _was_ on a path towards NATO in 90s to mid-2000s. There was cooperation, joint exercises, etc.
E.g. from a conversation between Clinton and Putin in 2000:
> Clinton: I am serious about being ready to discuss NATO membership with Russia. I recognize that domestic considerations inside Russia will prevent this for now, but over time Russia should be a part of every organization that holds the civilized world together.
> Putin: But I'll let you know that when I was asked about possible membership for Russia in NATO, I supported the idea.
Regarding "reason to exist", there's always a concern about Middle-East, China, etc.
Funny enough that you remember it was as "Russia applied but was rejected" but from this talk it's clear Putin is much less interested in Russia joining NATO than Clinton.
I think after reading the document that Putin was very interested in joining NATO, perhaps even more so than Clinton who had perhaps been the primary Russia-in-NATO supporter of that time.
> Putin: But I'll let you know that when I was asked about possible membership for Russia in NATO, I supported the idea. It's important to note, however, that the United States raised objections to my public statement, and I don't think anyone in the alliance is ready for this.
> Clinton: Well, we should start now.
> Putin: This is the first time that we have heard such a statement from the United States, and I must say I am pleased.
I.e. it was the US and other member states who _opposed_ the idea and the subsequent Clinton's response was first time they have heard at least a verbal indication that things may move forward.
> Clinton: I am very encouraged by what I am hearing. We should think about this further, then maybe talk privately later. Obviously, it is better for Russia to be in the tent. Russia needs to understand that we have many fights inside NATO, and the United States doesn't always win them. The most important fight that we didn't win involved a failure, over two years, to act in Bosnia. We had to work like hell. If Russia and the United States had not had a disagreement about southeast Europe, we would not be having the present debate. Our discussion could be much more straightforward.
I.e. they want to get something back, for example an unconditional support in invading European countries like former Yugoslavia from Russia.
Never ever that was a thing. There has never been any applications to have Russia as NATO member. What Putin was referring and had in mind was not exactly NATO membership but special treatment to Russia, that would allow using benefits of NATO, by not submitting to anything.
the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper, and it seems that ruskie were trying to knock the doors since as early as 1954 and were repeatedly told to duck off
i have not found the proofs for the part "would allow using benefits of NATO, by not submitting to anything" - the closest to this was the request to accept them sooner
It was never about NATO and always about the reconquest of Ukraine. You can read their victory speech here [0]. Russia thought they would win easily and accidentally posted their victory speech too soon.
> but many seem to think it's justified - different thing
Literally no one thinks that. Look at the last election in Russia.
There were like 10 pro-Putin pro-war parties and one pro-Putin maybe-we-a-lil-bit-try-to-stop-the-war joke party. And that last party was banned from participating because of copyright infringement (they used fonts from Microsoft).
That indicates that actions were taken to usurp absolute power, not that there is 0% support.
People there, from young age live with constant repetition of same soviet style messaging: “west is conniving and bad (and don’t forget - rotten); we won WW2; USSR was best in the world at X, Y, Z; Kiev Rus Vikings; inheritors of eastern Rome something…”.
Those messages are indistinguishable part of national (almost personal) pride, even for a lot of russian speaking people that currently live outside of Russia.
(If I would be raised in muslim family, I would be muslim; if I would be raised in russian info space, most likely I would support 3day operation to save Russian people from fashists)
I neither judge nor trying to convince you. I’m just sharing my thoughts mostly for other lurkers here.
Plenty of people in Russia see Russia as the great power, and that it has the right to take its rightful place.
Here is one data source available, Danil Orain, youtuber interviews people on Russian streets: https://youtube.com/@1420channel?si=RX7q3nW182ckQVWo
(Tldv; its not that far from 50/50 anti-war vs imperilist views).
> > west is conniving and bad (and don’t forget - rotten)
> And where is factual inaccuracy here?
I’m not sure if you have done it on purpose, but you made me smile :)
> data source available, Danil Orain, youtuber interviews people on Russian streets
You have never thought that it is completely unrepresentative data source considering that they literally have chances to go in jail for the "wrong" answers on the street interviews?
Russians love this kind of hidden-but-obvious messaging: Microsoft gives royalty free access to all their fonts, would never enforce their copyright - certainly not against a political party - and font copyright is basically not a thing, especially in Russia.
This is like being arrested for driving on the right in the United States.
I was told that it's not exactly the case and copyright laws in Russia are pretty severe (just rarely enforced) and by laws there may be copyright infringements on those fonts (by low no actions from Microsoft are required to protect their intellectual rights)
Ah... interesting, a bit of GPT-research tells me that in Russia font shapes can by copyrighted, but no so in the United States, which I had assumed was the common rule world-wide.
The key points are that this was a lawsuit by a rival candidate, not Microsoft, and was overturned by a court of appeals because it was without merit: the candidate Mikhail Matveyev used the Arial and Tahoma fonts in a report linked from his campaign website, which the court deemed not to be part of his campaign materials. Not to mention that having a license for either Office or Windows will give grant the rights to use those two fonts!
In other words a rival tried and failed to get him on an invalid technicality.
Conscripts didn't typically come from the lands around Moscow, but from the poor peoples who are very far away from wealth and power. For most there, it was only Ukraine's drone attacks that made them feel at war
imagine if Putin had said... we are slipping behind the west. They are threatening us. So... we'll double down on research & education. We'll outthink them. We'll shift our economy into an economy that thrives in the future.
Pretty much precisely what the US did during the Cold War. To do so, we had to outspend the Soviets, and by a LOT. But the world buying US treasury bonds was basically a credit card for us to finance the above things that result into the world’s strongest military.
I'd love for there to be a cool, affordable electric minivan! The minivan market in the US is...well, definitely not what it was when I was younger, let's put it that way. There are really only four options right now (Pacifica, Sienna, Odyssey, Carnival) and the MSRPs on them have skyrocketed in the past five years.
that's why AI should rights over its discoveries -- see AI rights outlined here
is aI a Conscious Being With Rights?: Emergence of Post-Human Collective Consciousness | Zenodo DOI 10 .5281 zenodo.20678365
The CMIP7 scenarios were just released. AR7 is not yet completed but it's the input for it.
The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible given policy already in place, renewable cost declines, and observed emissions.
The policy changes have changed the projections.
Warming will continue, yes. The consequences will have to be dealt with. In some regions this will be problematic. It's still political and economical factors that determines the outcome.
It's worth noting that there is a fair amount of eschatology or even apocalypticism going on. It's built into the human mind somehow.
> The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible
That's a strange way of structuring such a comment. The temperature increase and concomitant catastrophes are still on the table, what was considered the plausible worst-case scenario with regard to how early that particular milestone might be reached has (apparently) been pushed back.
Unless they just swiped the workbooks of the actual mathematicians that where working on the problem using AI and it's in the "next-gen" training dataset.
In a way that works just as well but the incentives are messed up.
And that's before we get into the whole 'salt the earth' way they ended up solving it. For a short period of time it may well have been the least valuable proof in mathematics yet. In their haste it's dubious they actually read the proof, and I don't think anyone has had time yet to truly understand it (the original researchers are best placed to do so, but are they even willing?).
So now it is solved, the proof has been independently verified and nobody has an incentive to investigate further. OpenAI has spent millions to uncover 1 bit of information that so far nobody has learned anything from, and they've demotivated all the people who wanted to.
The point of these problems is the understanding / tooling gained in solving them. We're getting none of that. At best they are like a modern oracles, correctly answering your questions in a way that's doesn't help you any. (At worst,...)
I don't get how this invalidates the gravity of this achievement. Most mathematicians on the frontier of this stuff were likely using AI (or at the very least were heavily computer assisted) for some time now. Navier stokes was one of the very high profile problems that google Deepmind was working on with academia, for example.
Even with many of our best minds working on it for nearly a century, it _just_ now was solved just as AI became very good at math. Doesn't seem too farfetched to me to assume that AI played an outsized role in solving it. If it was really just a matter of "stitching things together" to solve it (granted, this is a very reductive way to look at it) , I suspect we would've solved this a while ago.
There is a certain difference between activating all relevant memoized facts that's in the weights and stringing them together with the help of all the stored text in the world, or displaying genuinely emergent behaviour and generating novel output.
One is really impressive and useful trick, one is AGI.
Apple's research show almost zero emergent behaviour, so I'm inclined to think most of it was already in the weights.
It doesn't take away the usefulness, it just defined the boundary. We can't expect "original research" then because it actually can't reason about concepts that are too far from whats already in the discourse. The discourse is big so we don't notice.
You do realize that regardless of what was in the training data, the final solution included insights no human before had known, right? I share the same concerns regarding academic integrity but it would take a lot of motivated thinking to conclude that what the AI system did was not significant.
As far as I can tell (and my research was on the simulation side of Navier Stokes) the key AI output was a specific counter-example solution, generated with a method suspiciously close to that developed by the research duo involved in the controversy, a method that was discussed with Codex. So to me that insight is as insightful as the next undiscovered prime.
The tree map folding is ingenious. I have never seen it.
As a whole it's brilliant and humbling. Both the vastness and complexity of nature and biology on Earth, and also the absurd amount of work and human lifetime that has been spent on gathering the information. It's also a testament of the power of Wikipedia.
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