That’s inherent to the idea of theft. We judge thieves based on their thefts.
It’s irrelevant if they also happen to have a bunch of stuff they didn’t steal.

A few stolen artifacts corrupt the legitimacy of the entire exhibit.

If we’re just talking math, triangles can be defined in terms of 3-element subsets of all 3 (A)ngles and 3 (S)ides:
SSS - unique
SAS - unique
ASS - may be unique depending on the lengths of the sides
ASA - unique
SAA - unique
AAA - infinite solutions

Maybe someone cleverer than me can figure out how that maps on to love and gender.

Yes and emergent behavior goes both ways. Organizations have many properties that the individuals they’re made up of don’t have and they lack many properties that individuals have. Organizations don’t have feelings. Even in the rare cases when the feelings of the people in those organizations are homogeneous, the organizations almost never manifest those feelings without significant alterations.

Are you seriously comparing Joe Rogan with NATO strategists?

There’s a bit more to it than that.

NATO is a strategic alliance lead by the US. NATO doesn’t have any feelings and isn’t pleased or displeased about anything. Instead it generally does whatever is the US believes is most strategically advantageous.

Those strategist are typically smart people who listen to all kinds of things. They’re definitely careful about what they say though and won’t go around promoting information they don’t want suppressed.

China knows that the US has a lot of economic leverage. They’ve been working very hard to change that and a lot of those efforts have flown under the radar.

BRI is pretty obvious and it’s seen as one of the major reason the ASEAN countries are pivoting towards China. But consider the whole South China Sea issue. Everyone frames it as a contest over sea resources and few people consider the strait of Malacca. It’s a potential choke point for all trade west of Southeast Asia. While China is working to be able to defend that they’re also working with Thailand to build a canal that would bypass the straight of Malacca all together. All of that is primarily to reduce US leverage and those initiatives tend to work more often than they fail.

US is by far it’s largest customer

That’s true and there’s also more to it.

The US is China’s largest single trading partner but China has many many trading partners.

May nations now trade or at least negotiate in blocks. Both ASEAN and the UE, as blocks, do more trade with China than the US does. When it comes to individual nations the US isn’t as far ahead as it might seem. Russia, Vietnam and Taiwan together trade more with China than the US does, despite having a combined GDP that’s a tiny fraction of the US.

The key issue is that China has been working really hard to make itself less dependent on the US. They still have a way to go but they’re much less vulnerable than they were a few years ago.

That seems to be highly dependent on where they are.

In some cities, everyone on public transport behaves themselves. They’re clean and there’s no fear that they’ll be harassed or assaulted. Some people really like that and get afraid or skeeved when they think about some public transport systems.

In other cities public transportation riders are expected to “live and let live”. Officials won’t stop you from doing anything unless it presents an imminent danger. Some people love the freedom from that sort of system and hate the idea of someone forcing them to behave a certain way.

There are, of course, many reasons why certain public transport systems are more like one than the other; money, age, geography, preferences, etc. While there are great arguments for public transportation and I’m a huge fan of improving the infrastructure around it, I can also recognize that a lot of people’s actual experience of public transport doesn’t paint it in a good light.

But it’s so satisfying.

You’re right. They’re not LLMs and they’re not particularly new.

The main new part is that new techniques in AI and better hardware means that we can get better answers than we used to be able to get. Many people also realize that there’s a lot of potential to develop systems that are much better at answering those questions.

So when people ask, “Why are companies investing in AI when customers hate AI.” Part of the answer is that they’re investing in something different than what most people think of when they hear “AI”.

A lot of people have come to realize that LLMs and generative AI aren’t what they thought it was. They’re not electric brains that are reasonable replacements for humans. They get really annoyed at the idea of a company trying to do that.

Some companies are just dumb and want to do it anyway because they misread their customers.

Some companies know their customer hate it but their research shows that they’ll still make more money doing it.

Many people that are actually working with AI realize that AI is great for a much larger set of problems. Many of those problems are worth a ton of money; (eg. monitoring biometric data to predict health risks earlier, natural disaster prediction and fraud detection).

I think that still boils down to attrition and relative size.

From what I’ve seen. Russia has only pulled small numbers of troops out of other theaters to reinforce Kursk. They’ve had an ongoing assault on Avdiivka and they don’t seem to have pulled enough troops out of there to slow down the assault.

The impact, both the severity of the impact and the duration of the impact is likely to hinge on how deep Russias reserves are and their overall production capacity. As near as I can tell, they have both in spades.

From what I’ve seen on Russian industrial production they don’t really care too much if all of Kursk were destroyed. It’s not a strategic location (I think) and all the human and material resources can be easily and quickly replaced.

That obviously involves a lot of guesswork on my part. That’s why I’m wondering if someone with expertise just knows the answers to these kinds of questions (and would hopefully also provide sources).

If that’s the case then Ukraine would need to repeat the Kursk invasion a lot before it made a difference.

Trying to out attrit an opponent with many times the population and GDP is a pretty tall order.

I’m trying to differentiate between things we might like and things that are actually likely.

That makes sense. I’d have questions about all of those too

a) be intended to divide Russian attention and spread their forces out Do we know if that’s happening? Russia has a lot of people and equipment and it’s not obvious to me that they need to pull many resources from other fronts to reinforce Kursk.

b) be used in negotiation and applying domestic pressure to Putin That would make sense too. As long as Ukraine is still holding that territory when those negotiations are going on. Are there any estimates on when those negotiations could happen and if Ukraine will still be in control of Kursk by then?

c) provide a greater buffer for air-defense to counter inbound artillery and missiles
That true but only in the areas directly near Kursk. Is it likely that this can be repeated along the rest of the battle lines?

Your intuition on what Ukraine is hoping to achieve seems reasonable but I don’t know if it’s likely to work out that way.

The whole thing makes me think back to the “Ukrainian counteroffensive” from last year. At the time, US advisors were telling them to do a fast combined arms assault on some place like Mariupol, instead of dithering around, letting the Russians build a ton of defenses and then smashing all the fancy US equipment against said defenses. This assault seems almost like what that counteroffensive should have been. I say “almost” because I’m puzzled about the target. Controlling Mariupol would have cut off the entire western half of the Russian assault. They’d have no supplies and nowhere to run to besides going for a swim. Kursk? The benefits are less obvious.

defcon warning system forums

I’ll check them out. I’m curious why you wouldn’t want to link to them. Do they do something bad?

I’ve been looking for some sort of analysis of this Kursk incursion but have come up empty handed. I’m looking for something along the lines of Markus Reisner’s analyses.

In particular, I’m wondering what the likely paths are to altering the course of the war.

How likely is it that Ukraine will be able to hold this territory? Will they be able to use it as a staging area to launch additional attacks?

Is it likely to alter the artillery equation? Russia currently fires 3-5 times as many artillery shells as Ukraine does. Does this do something like limiting their production rates or their ability to deliver ordinance to the front lines?

Is it likely that Ukraine killed or captured enough Russian troops to impact the broader war?

A phrase like, “That figure is almost as much territory as Russia has seized in Ukraine this year.” kind of implies that there has been a shift in the momentum of the war and that we can expect such announcements more regularly going forward. Is that actually likely?

My pessimistic guess is that this was a brilliant tactical move that will ultimately get steamrolled by Russia’s sheer mass, but I’d love to read an analysis from someone with more expertise.

I keep wondering if information like this will change anyone’s mind about Disney.

It seems like all Iger has to do is throw a little shade at Trump or DeSantis and everyone instantly believes that Disney is some sort of bastion of progressive thought that doesn’t have a vile history of exploitation.

Which country? You’re gonna have to be a bit more specific with than that.

Yeah. I get the intent but it comes off kind of gross.

It’s true. Hamas is posting rookie numbers. They’ve got to up their death count by around 10x before they can be in Israel’s league.

There are many subcultures around food. It’s not like the world is split between vegans and junk food addicts.

The Cheeto and McDonalds eating crowd may have crappy nutrition but they’re an extreme. The other extreme is meal-preppers. They know exactly how much chicken, rice and broccoli they’re eating.

There are huge communities of people who are very health conscious. Some of them focus their consciousness on science, some of them on other methods. Some of those people are vegans. Some aren’t.