FaceDeer

Indeed. This sort of thing goes way back - the term “barbarian” was literally a result of Romans making fun of how non-Roman languages sounded to them (they used the onomatopoeia of “Bar Bar” to represent what they thought foreign languages sounded to them). Dismiss their language as meaningless gibber and you dismiss their thoughts as meaningless too.

Yeah, this looks just plain awesome. Grocery stores are so bland and samey, it’d be nice if they had more creative decor like this.

Saying a black person is “well spoken” is such a common slight in the US, as if it should be surprising somehow that they’re not all speaking Jive or Hip-hop or whatever. If people insult African-Americans like that what hope do Liberians have?

Yeah, this is more of a camp. A camp where they can concentrate a specific sub-population of people into.

Don’t know if there’s a specific word for that.

I think more likely someone in Ukraine quietly asked Trump “hey, would you like to have one of our hotels?”

Or it’s just a symptom of pure chaos and random decision making, which is not uncommon in this administration.

PJM has lost more than 5.6 net gigawatts in the last decade as power plants shut faster than new ones enter service, according to a PJM presentation filed with regulators this year. PJM added about 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity in 2024, fewer than smaller grids in California and Texas. Meanwhile, data center demand is surging. By 2030, PJM expects 32 gigawatts of increased demand on its system, with all but two of those gigawatts coming from data centers.

So this is a combination of utter mismanagement by the power companies, combined with growth in data center demand. Data centers are not purely AI. And I would expect that if PJM continues to be a basket case with exceptionally high prices those data centers will move elsewhere, or at least not get set up so more in those locations. Data centers generally don’t have to be located in specific places, by their nature. AI-specific ones in particular since the bandwidth required is a lot smaller than their processing power.

Clearly what we need to do is ban plastic straws some more.

The image’s caption:

Bret Adee, one of the largest US beekeepers, has 55,000 hives used to pollinate crops. As monoculture farming spreads, bees have to be moved across the country, especially for almonds, blueberries and cherries. He lost 75% of his bees over the past year. Photograph: K Brinson/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

A quick Google search reveals that his operation, Adee Honey Farms, is in South Dakota. here’s another article on this subject with a different photograph of the same place. Their web page doesn’t have many photos of the field in question, but there’s a couple.

This is not an AI image.

I’m not trying to argue for or against this position. As I said all I’m doing is explaining a misrepresentation of the position that people are holding, namely that “a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.”

I don’t see what it’s going to conclude that we haven’t already.

Well, that’s the point of trying to build ASI. To have it think of things that we haven’t been able to think of.

I really, really, can’t picture a scenario where we actually listen.

Of course not, you’re not an ASI.

That’s fine, I’m just correcting the misrepresentation of the view that was in the headline.

Nobody’s expecting a “machine that can’t think straight” to do it. Some people are hoping that a more competent machine will be developed.

Geoengineering is a field dedicated to exactly that - mitigating climate change by modifying solar input and so forth.

Basically, the Republicans have been shooting the environment and now want to ban tourniquets and sutures.

Maybe this is because China just said they needed Russia to win? Trump’s got an obsession with opposing China.

Or maybe it’s just the way the mush inside Trump’s skull happened to flow this particular day.

Next headline up: Taliban sends troops to Kursk to support Russian defenders there.

This timeline just keeps getting weirder.

Israel: “Hang on, we’re not done killing everyone first.”

Iron, aluminium, titanium, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, potassium, I could go on listing elements at great length. There are plenty of resources out there. Celestial bodies are made of resources. You name it, you can find it out there in various abundances.

Helium-3 is just one of the few things you can find out there that is basically unavailable on Earth. It’s myopic to focus solely on that.

I don’t care about what international law says, this is what world war means as I understand it. I said that to begin with. International law is often even more nebulous and open to interpretation than most national law given there isn’t really a universal framework for adjudicating it.

I’d be curious for a citation, though. I looked for some and found way more instances where international courts and laws held that supplying weapons counted as being involved in a war than the contrary. For example:

• The law of neutrality (Hague V & XIII of 1907) prohibits neutral states from furnishing “supplies of war” to any belligerent. Violating that duty strips a state of its neutral status and exposes it to lawful countermeasures by the aggrieved party.
• Under state-responsibility rules (ILC Articles on State Responsibility, Art. 16), a state “aid[ing] or assist[ing]” another in committing an internationally wrongful act—armed force included—is complicit, provided it does so with knowledge of the circumstances.

I think you’ve got an overly narrow view of “direct involvement.” If I’m in a war with someone and a country tells me “here, take these weapons” and I say “you know I’m going to use these weapons to kill soldiers of the country I’m at war with” and they say “yes, we know. We actually have some specific conditions about how and where you can use these to kill them, and some satellite photos to help you target them” then I’d call that direct involvement. Flesh-and-blood soldiers are only one small part of a nation’s military these days and not every part of a military needs to be involved for the military overall to be involved.

I think we’re already in it. A world war, as I understand it, is basically just a situation where a variety of alliances and tensions build up until when a war erupts in one spot it rapidly spreads around to involve a large number of countries world-wide. That seems to be the case already, you can easily build a Pepe Silvia wall-of-crazy showing all the connections between Russia and China and Iran and Syria and Israel and Hungary and Ukraine and Belarus and the United States and Taiwan and on and on. The actual shooting pew pew warfare is still relatively confined (though bear in mind that literally a million Russian casualties have happened over a thousands-of-kilometers-long front line riddled with trenches and minefields, which is pretty significant) but all these countries are throwing their weight in on those fights and it’s easy to imagine them branching out quite quickly when conditions change.