What benefit does Russia get from escalating to nuclear weapons?
Putin wants to be alive, and have a country to be in charge of. Ukrainian aggression forcing a peace that’s more favorable to them doesn’t cost him either of those things. Deploying nuclear weapons against NATO does.
It’s not about whether or not Putin is willing to use nuclear weapons in the abstract. It’s about whether he would actually derive any benefit from doing so.
That’s meaningless. Russia can call it an act of war all they want, it doesn’t actually do anything. The only way for the US to get “drawn into” the war is for Russia to directly attack a NATO country, which there is literally zero chance of Russia doing, because if they can’t win a war against a single country being funded and supplied by NATO, how the fuck would they ever have a chance to prevail against the real thing?
You can find fringe cases of anything. That’s why they’re fringe. I refuse to constantly add ten pages of fucking legal disclaimers to every comment I make just to account for the possibility that one idiot tweeted something one time to their ten followers.
Not even remotely, and it’s really important to understand a) why there is a difference, and b) why that difference matters, or else you are going to hoover up every bit of propoganda these desperate conmen feed you.
People are not automated systems, and automated systems are not people.
Something that people are generally pretty good at is understanding that a process has failed, even if we can’t understand how it has failed. As the adage goes “I don’t need to be a helicopter pilot to see one stuck in a tree and immediately conclude that someone fucked up.”
LLMs can’t do that. A human and an LLM will both cheerfully produce the wrong answer to “How many Rs in Strawberry.” But a human, even one who knows nothing about cooking, will generally suspect that something might be up when asked to put glue on pizza. That’s because the human is capable of two things the LLM isn’t; reasoning, and context. The human can use their reasoning to draw upon the context provided by their real life experience and deduce that “Glue is not food, and I’ve never previously heard of it being used in food. So something here seems amiss.”
That’s the first key difference. The second is in how these systems are deployed. You see the conmen trying to sell us all on their “AI” solutions will use exactly the kind of reasoning that you bought - “Hey, humans fuck up too, it’s OK” - in order to convince us that these AI systems can take the place of human beings. But in the process that requires us to place an automated system in the position of a human system.
There’s a reason why we don’t do that.
When we use automation well, it’s because we use it for tasks where the error rate on the automated system can be reduced to something far, far lower than that of a well trained human. We don’t expect an elevator to just have a brain fart and take us to the wrong floor every now and then. We don’t expect that our emails will sometimes be sent to a completely different address to the one we typed in. We don’t expect that there’s a one in five chance that our credit card will be billed a different about to what was shown on the machine. None of those systems would ever have seen widespread adoption if they had a standard error rate of even 5%, or 1%.
Car manufacturing is something that can be heavily automated, because many of the procedures are simple, repeatable, and controllable. The last part is especially important. If you move all the robots in a GM plant to new spots they will instantly fail. If you move the u humans to new spots, they’ll be quite annoyed, but perfectly capable of moving themselves back to the correct places. Yet despite how automatable car manufacturing is, it still employs a LOT of humans, because so many of those tasks do not automate sufficiently well.
And at the end of the day, a fucked up car is just a fucked up car. Healthcare uses a lot less automation than car manufacturing. That’s not because healthcare companies are stupid. Healthcare is one of the largest industries in North America. They will gladly take any automation they can get. I know this because my line of work involves healthcare companies regularly asking me for automotion. But they also have a very, very low threshold for failure. If one of our systems fails even one time they will demand a full investigation of the failure.
This is because automated systems, when they are employed, have to be load bearing. They have to be something reliable enough that people can stop thinking about it, even though that same level of reliability isn’t demanded from the human components of these systems.
This is largely because, generally speaking, humans have much more ability to recognize and correct the failures of other humans. Medical facilities organise themselves around multiple layers of trust and accountability. One of the demands we get most is for more tools to give oversight into what the humans in the system are doing. But that’s because a human is well equipped to recognize when another human is in a failure state. A human can spot that another human came into work hungover. A human can build a context for which of their fellow humans are reliable and which aren’t. Human systems are largely self-healing. High risk work is doled out to high reliability humans. Low reliability humans have their work checked more often.
But it’s very hard for a human to build context for how reliable an automated system is. This is because the workings of that system are opaque; they do not have the context to understand why the system fails when it fails. In fact, when presented with an automated system that sometimes fails, the way most humans will react its to treat the system as if it always fails. If a button fails to activate on the first press one or two times, you will come back to that same facility a year later to find that it has become common practice for every staff member to press the button five times in a row, because they’ve all been told that sometimes it fails on the first press.
When presented with an unreliable automated system, humans will choose to use a human instead, because they have assessed that they can better determine when the human has failed and what to do about it.
And, paradoxically, because we have such a low tolerance for failure in automated systems, when presented with an automated system that will be taking on the work of a human, humans naturally expect that system to be more or less perfect. They expect it to meet the threshold that we tend to set for automated systems. So they don’t check its work, even when when told to.
The lie that LLMs fuck up in the same way that humans do is used to get a foot in the door, to sell LLM driven systems as a replacement for human labour. But as soon as that replacement is actually being sold, the lie goes away, replaced by a different lie (often a lie by omission); that this will be as reliable as every other automated system you use. Or, at the very least, that “It will be more reliable than a human.” The sellers say this meaning, say, 5% more reliable (in reality the actual failure rate of humans in these tasks is often much, much lower than that of LLMs, especially when you account for false positives which are usually ignored whenever someone touts numbers saying that an LLM did a job better than a human). But the people using the system naturally assume it means “More reliable in the way you expect automated systems to be reliable.”
All of this creates a massive possibility for real, meaningful hazard. And all of this is before you even get into the specific ways in which LLMs fuck up, and how those fucks up are much more difficult to correct or control for. But thats a whole separate rant.
But I’m forced to credit them with intelligence, by the framing of the theory.
You see that, right?
The supposition is that these people engaged in a massive ballot stuffing scheme, and covered it up so well (including successfully obtaining the silence of every one of the people involved) that the only evidence left is an abnormally high number of bullet ballots.
So they have to be smart enough and self-serving enough to do all that, but stupid enough to not do the obvious - and selfish - thing and make those ballots straight ticket votes.
See my previous point about any argument that relies on the same people simultaneously displaying extremes of competence and incompetence. I’m not saying that never happens, but it is usually a good indicator that you’re engaging in wishful thinking.
For the record the “change” from that deal would be, measured to any reasonable degree of accuracy, exactly one googol.
It’s really really hard to explain how numbers that big work.
Basically if you had ten trillion dollars, and you spent one single cent, you would have spent a greater proportion of your wealth than that fine would be as a proportion of one googol dollars.
And just to really put all that in perspective, let’s talk about how big that fine actually is.
It’s frequently said that it’s more than the entire world’s GDP, but that’s not even close. Imagine if every single planet (not “habitable planet”, just “planet”) in our galaxy - all eight trillion of them - was terraformed to support life. Imagine if all of them had a population and economy like Earth. The entire galaxy’s GDP wouldn’t be enough.
In fact, a hundred of those galaxies wouldn’t be enough. A thousand wouldn’t be enough. A hundred thousand wouldn’t be enough. It would take 20 million of those galaxies to pay that fine (at the time of reporting; by now its more galaxies than exist in all the known universe, because it doubles every day).
And all of that would still be a rounding error to a rounding error against one googol.
Do what you need to do to take care of yourself. “First, do no harm” applies to you as much as to anyone else.
You didn’t fail us.
We failed you.
Ford: Yes, but what about all these bribes?
Generally speaking, a good test for fantastical thinking is when your theory relies on the same people displaying outlandish degrees of both competence and incompence at the same time.
If the people who did this are good enough to pull off - and keep quiet - a fraud at this scale, how did they fuck up such an elementary component?
If they’re capable of fucking up something that basic, how is it that they’ve failed to leave any other stunningly obvious evidence?
Personally, I’m of the opinion that even apparently fair elections should be treated as active crime scenes. That’s how we do things in Canada. Everything is checked and rechecked. But this particular theory seems to have veered pretty far into moon landing territory.
The people below him matter because they enact his agenda. The fact that there is a cult of personality around Trump absolutely explains why real voters would vote that way. But anyone enacting a ballot stuffing scheme on his behalf would almost certainly understand that he needs cronies to actually do any of the things he wants to do.
Without calling into question the broader possibility that malfeasance did occur, I don’t feel like this argument is particularly credible.
Suppose you were to engage in some form of straight up ballot stuffing? Why then would you make them bullet ballots? Why not vote straight ticket Republican? Straight ticket ballots are not unusual - even less so then bullet ballots, apparently - so you’d draw less suspicion, and you’d get the benefit of lots of extra down ticket votes.
If someone was going to cheat, what benefit would they gain from cheating this way?
To be fair, it’s been a longstanding rule with Republicans that whatever they accuse others of is merely a projection of what they’ll do the moment they can get away with it. Whether or not they would try to steal an election isn’t even a question. They’ve as much as admitted it. The only question is whether or not they did. I’ve not seen any evidence to that effect, and I’m not presuming there is any, but it would be idiotic not to at least contemplate the possibility.
It’s astonishing to me that anyone ever entertained the idea that MAGA was a freak event, even back in 2016.
Why? No one ever accused chatbots of always being wrong. In fact, it would be actually be better if they were. The biggest problem with LLMs is that they’re right just often enough that its hard to catch when they’re wrong.
I want to point out that even if they are, the incentive is still having the desired effect, because in that scenario it makes it much more profitable to sell an EV than to sell an ICE vehicle, meaning the manufacturers are going to push the EV’s more. And given that incentive, they would still be strongly incentivized to price the EV’s in a, way that compares will with their ICE offerings, even if they could theoretically sell them cheaper.
A big part of getting results is understanding how to turn greed to your advantage.
Amazing that the state that is the poster child for “destroying your economy with aggressive tax cuts” is like “Surely this time Reagan will rise from the grave and bless us with his divine power.”
Republicans: “Billionaires are just better than everyone else and we should all get out of their way and hand them the keys to everything for the betterment of all mankind.”
Republicans After Being Forced to Spend One (1) Week Around Elon Musk: “No, shit, wait, these guys are fucking idiots!”
Wow, it’s almost like they fired all their developers, cancelled every good game they were working on, and underfunded the crap out of the rest so they were destined for failure.
Remember when Aspyr released a hotly anticipated remake of Battlefront and it failed because Embracer gave them no time to fix the bugs and no money to run servers? Yeah, like that.
Do you know who used to be part of Embracer? Sabre. Who just released Space Marine 2, a game that sold absolute gangbusters (because it’s fucking awesome).
Embracer are the cause of all of Embracer’s ills. They hoovered up excellent mid-shelf studios, fucked them over, and then cried foul when consumers rejected the second rate slop that came out.
Spoiler; it was always soulless and dystopian.
If you’re a Destiny refugee, the most obvious answer is Warframe, which just keeps on getting better and better.