You don't decide an outcome, you decide what you will do. Assuming Russia doesn't suddenly change goals, there is very little France can decide to do which could plausibly lead to the outcome "peace in a united Ukraine".
From what I understand this uses overdose numbers. They should also not be assumed to be comparable across countries (recording practices vary widely), but if they tell the same story as wastewater monitoring there may be something to it.
Political games - meaning, games with more than two players where you have wide discretion to help or hinder specific opponents - naturally bleed into real life. To have a loyal friend in these games who lets you win at their own expense, is a good strategy - you'll simply win a lot more games that way. Grudges carrying over from one game to the next becomes a natural part of play too - what else could dictate who you let win, if you end up in a kingmaker situation?
Politics has a habit of infecting everything. If you are determined enough to win, even games like Monopoly or Catan with relativelt modest political elements degenerate towards Diplomacy (or Nash's "So long sucker"). That's why in modern game design, designers try to limit the scope for politics to the absolute minimum, so that any game can be enjoyed in isolation without a metagame of grudges and off-table alliances.
My core group will backstab each other gleefully and when the game is over, that’s it. We’re done. Because none of this is real. We wouldn’t even help each other if we played with other people. We’re all trying to win.
Although I suppose you’re right. If I played with two people, and the role of one of them is simply to help the others game, I’d never play with them.
> To have a loyal friend in these games who lets you win at their own expense, is a good strategy - you'll simply win a lot more games that way.
I think that's only true if your goal is to win. I play board games to have fun with friends and family, and winning every time - especially because someone else hands you a win - is no fun at all.
This hasn't really been my experience. We constantly used to gang up on a guy who was super good at this. Also he was an expert at tricking people into doing his bidding.
He really wasn't like that IRL.
Couples/brothers murdering each other is a common theme though.
Also, I remember I used to care way too much about nerd stuff like this. Nowadays I can't find the headspace, real life just kept creeping in.
That most people are sincere in their beliefs (in AI doom), as the author says and I think too, doesn't mean there aren't cult leader-types exploiting these beliefs. And their private beliefs may be quite different from their stated ones.
I'm very interested in this topic. I have been using AI for genealogy, but not in ways that have been able to push family history back or catch mistakes (yet).
So how do you use the models more specifically? I have so far used them to write a - in some ways - better genealogy program, with some features I've sorely missed especially with respect to DNA genealogy. I've also tried to use them to help with the tedium of transcribing horrible handwriting, but the results have been so poor and with such a high level of hallucinations that I've not tried that for a while.
- ask it to generate Lean 4 proofs based off centimorgans
- extract subject, object, subjects from all source texts and create a graph database (maybe someone mentioned a red dog in their oral history, and someone else mentioned a sick dog in a eulogy, ask ai to explore weakly correlated connections, sometimes pays off)
> ask it to generate Lean 4 proofs based off centimorgans
That's not confidence inspiring. It'll give you proofs I'm sure, but with what assumptions? You need a full blown model for crossover, and even that would hardly help, because you don't know what assumptions went into the segment match. What size segments are filtered out, how many mismatches are ignored, how interpolation is done, how no-calls are treated etc. Let alone the cM value for services which don't give segments!
And then there's that the question for instance Bettinger's shared cM project asks (given this relationship, what shared cM level do you expect to see?) is actually very different from the question we most often ask (given this shared cM level, what relationship should I expect?). When you get into the distant cousin range, those questions can be very different indeed. And we're not even getting into endogamy.
They say the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool. I'm worried that AI can be really powerful self-fooling tools!!
aha I appreciate the rant, and you obviously know what you are talking about.
I have used the Lean 4 approach and I wasn't proposing it solves the problem, but it has reduced the search space for me in certain circumstances. At best it's a nice way for agents to keep in their context windows potential relations, I made it create enormous amounts of hypothetical nodes and then visualized it so I could talk with my relatives about potential paths.
As a side note, I believe, if we had a better DNA site that had great API access (and exposed genomes), I think agents could probably solve genealogy, even as far as complex endogamics.
(I don't think centimorgans is that useful past 4 generations kind of thing)
I see it as obvious that the Nord Stream pipeline was not blown up without US permission at the very least. (And the media's insistence that it was probably Russia which blew up their own pipeline convinced me beyond doubt that they see loyalty to the war effort as trumping any obligation to the truth). Of course there are going to be sabotage actions the other way too.
International reporting was almost all that it was a Ukrainian operation, eg:
> On 6 June 2023, The Washington Post reported that an intelligence agency of an unnamed European "close ally" had notified the CIA of a Ukrainian military plan for a covert attack on the pipeline. The plan was to be carried out by a team of divers reporting to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, but the Post did not report any evidence that it had been put into action. The US reportedly learned of the plan three months before the destruction of the pipeline, and shared the intelligence with Germany and other allies.
Ukraine is currently striking facilities deep inside Russia.
Russia could hit back in the same way easily, and to some degree they do. But their problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia - until they got that in May 2024, Ukraine understandably did not risk alienating their suppliers by doing that.
There aren't very many new lines of escalation crossed here. Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now - many hawks in the west haven't been shy about describing it as such either.
Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.
It's a significant step to escalate to attacking those countries.
> Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now
It is an interesting argument to choose to invade a country, act with faux outrage when they find allies willing to supply them with arms and then call it a proxy war.
Russia got themselves into this mess. They have an easy way to get out of it.
> Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.
My country, Norway, had a long-standing policy of not selling weapons to countries at war - yes even to the attacked party - because of the common understanding that would be tantamount to joining the war, and make us the target of reprisals. This prohibition also was a good shield against accusations of war profiteering or proxy warfare.
That policy which had been standing for 60+ years, was dropped for Ukraine.
Even if you are the most pacifist leader imaginable, at some point you have to draw a line with policies like that if you dont want to fold and hand over control to expansionist neighbors.
I figure a majority in Norway would have been willing to support Finland with more than just arms deliveries had they been the victim (would you agree with that?), so sending some cash + weapons to Ukraine seems consistent policy to me.
The point was not that you should never support a country that was attacked. The point was that you should be 100% above the table if you did that. If you weren't willing to fight yourself (and take the expected consequences, such as reprisals and sabotage), then you shouldn't sell weapons either.
And I'm sure statesmen like the Stoltenbergs would have defended this policy very eloquently, better than me, back when it was official policy...
And sure, it was broadly popular to get rid of this policy for Ukraine's benefit. It wasn't a hard sell to the public majority. Saying "let's take a step back and think principled about this" was the hard sell, as usual.
That's to me the same as saying the policy should never have existed in the first place. Your thinking could easily have been applied to justify the hand-grenade sale to Cuba which prompted the policy (I'm not even sure which side benefited from it, but that doesn't matter, your principles work either way!)
That’s simply not true and a gross misreprestation of the policy, which is still in place.
And it not dropped to cater to Ukraine, as it specifically has a carve-out for legal defensive war, which the Russian war of aggression towards Ukraine is.
Check snl.no/våpeneksport_fra_Norge, which is more reliable than Wikipedia on this.
It gives a list of the changes (or "clarifications") to the policy over the years. To the degree there ever was a carve-out for legal defensive war, it was certainly added after Ukraine.
Actually there were two phases: in 2022 they defend giving weapons to Ukraine in that it was a donation, not a commercial endeavor (that suggests to me that they implicitly admitted, commercial sales would have been against the policy). Then in 2024, they allowed direct commercial sales as well. Of course their defense lawyers will say the policy is still in place, but "realism" again: you can't blame Russia for not being convinced by that.
This is well beyond arms supplies, NATO is running their entire ISR and targeting show and quite vocal about it. Plantar, Starlink on drones etc. and that’s ignoring financing and production. If anything, the Russian response has been quite flaccid.
Yes, there is no doubt that NATO countries (except maybe the US/Trump some days) wants Ukraine to win. They train troops, help with intelligence etc.
There is no argument that they are neutral.
But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.
North Korea is supplying actual troops to Russia, and that doesn't mean Ukraine is at war with North Korea. Belarus and Iran have both supplied arms to Russia and Ukraine isn't at war with either.
Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
> But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.
> Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Is it so hard to see why Russia doesn't see things that way?
"Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
> "Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
I agree that realism is a much abused word, and I think this is an example of it.
The first part of your sentence is realism: it is not surprising that Russia chooses to treat Western help as taking part in the war. That does not make it true. Advising, supplying and sharing intelligence is not the same as fighting.
The second part is not realism. Realism explains what states do. It does not say who is right, or who has the right to complain. "Don't have a leg to stand on" is a moral judgment, with the word realism put on it.
This is exactly how Russia wants the word to be used. Right after the full invasion started, the Russian foreign ministry shared a Mearsheimer article that blamed the West for the war. The goal is to make Russia's actions look like a natural reaction to the West, so that objecting to them looks naive.
Maybe you don't mean it that way, but going from "unsurprising" to "don't have a leg to stand on" does the same thing.
> Yes, there is no doubt that NATO countries (except maybe the US/Trump some days) wants Ukraine to win. They train troops, help with intelligence etc.
There is actually much doubt about that. It rather seems they are content with Ukraine not loosing and draining Russia in the progress with little care what happens to Ukrain except that they keep up the fight.
It is very obvious to me that basically every country in the alliance wants Ukraine to win and Russia to lose, and this is clear because they actively spend lots of money on effecting that outcome.
But NATO members obviously don't want to be spending money on foreign military, so pro-Ukraine spending stays limited to "cost effective" levels.
You make this sound like some nefarious conspiracy by western war-fetishists, when the status quo is basically the obvious outcome given even a little western self-interest.
It seems to be the way they want Ukraine to win: Putin withdraws but keeps his power in Russia at all costs. But this goal is akin to threading a needle.
> Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Yeah, no. That is not how it works, American private companies are not just allowed to provide weapons of war without executive approval. If you remember, Trump is the one who removed Biden's ban on providing them targeting and the intel to hit Russia directly. The entire "Zelensky, please stopping hitting Russian diesel production" Trump thing is just an act - the US holds the keys to their (and the UK/EU, for that matter) ISR feeds.
And it is in a way. Ukraine is practically fighting on behalf of East European NATO states against Russian imperialism. NATO’s eastern flank is not immediately threatened only because Russia’s curbstomp invasion turned into a war of attrition.
GTFO, Russian propagandist. If Russia dislikes the state of affairs there's a reallyyy easy solution: don't invade other countries baselessly. "NATO's proxy war" is a really funny way to describe the Russian war of aggression.
Where's the lie? I said they now see it as NATOs proxy war against them, and western hawks are not shy about talking about it in those terms.
Yeah, they probably didn't expect it to turn into that when they attacked - they probably hoped it'd be all over in a week with a regime change in Kyiv. It's now they're thinking, shit, we were goaded into another Afghanistan. Which again, is not a way western hawks are shy of talking about it.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a cakewalk compared to what is going on today. 15k dead in 10 years, and the USSR was twice as big as modern ruzzia, so it is more like 7k dead for ruzzia alone. Now compare that to 4.5 years of the invasion of Ukraine - these wars are on a totally different scale. The Afghan affair was a remote low-profile endeavour; ports and oil refineries weren't burning all over the Soviet Union.
No, they are trying to justify actions against countries that supply arms to Ukraine.
As I point out in a other thread, supplying weapons is pretty normal and attacking random infrastructure in a country that happens to be allied to Ukraine is a significant escalation.
Where do you get this stuff? Only thing they’re saying is that Russia can’t attack Ukrainian weapon or munitions factories like Ukraine does to Russia because there aren’t many of them.
>> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
> But their [Russia's] problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia
That reads exactly like an argument justifying Russia's actions.
You are correct. We should fire all generals who aim to understand the enemy’s thought process. Why would they entertain these evil justifications?! At last victory will be ours when we finally stop making excuses for the bad guys and instead start blindly thrashing at them.
But an alternative commentary with the same facts would have been something like "Russia knew there was wide Western support for Ukraine but thought they would overrun the country before Western nations would be able to provide practical support. They dramatically miscalculated and now are trying to deter Western countries by slowly increasing actions."
This was basically what @jwr said that kicked off this subthread:
> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it.
I just don’t see it. They seem to be just saying that these attacks probably aren’t (mostly) about escalating right now because Russia has their hands fully (thanks to Ukrainian sacrifices), but simply about trying to disrupt both NATO internal cohesion and support for Ukraine. Of course, if they can kill two birds with one stone, all the better.
Seems like a completely reasonable analysis of Russia’s motivations. I don’t see any moral justification there.
What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.
The point is that what we think is valuable (and I agree, most corporate busywork is IMO a waste of everyone's precious time on this planet) doesn't matter under a system where labor and resources are ordered about by the people with the most money. Those jobs exist because our rulers (the ones in charge of the money) want them to, and that is the only definition of "valuable" that matters. Likewise, all the low-paid and unpleasant labor like digging up minerals with no safety equipment, sewing shoes for 17 hours a day, wiping asses in nursing homes, etc. is low-paid and unpleasant because our rulers want it that way.
> Lots and lots of middle management and HR jobs (off the top of my head) are absolutely 0 value add and definitely just leech off of actual labor.
That’s a very engineer type of take.
Both middle management and HR serve roles that are believed to be useful to someone (maybe not you).
Often it is some form of protection by serving as a fall guy or complying with regulations, but it can be other things (e.g., increasing headcount/budget to gain power, etc.).
Yes, many sales people or even whole sales teams are effectively dead weight, but a highly-skilled sales team is a godsend both to the company and the economy.
We should all be wishing for more effective sales teams — the world would be a better place.
Most people have never experienced a good sales team, so I’m guessing this sounds like total fiction.
how are they required at all? why can't a company publish its products and services on its website and customers can take it or leave it? why do we need commission-paid schmoozers in-between, who make multiples of what rank-and-file workers earn? The workers create value, and are paid the least. That's the definition of perversion.
A lot of that money is printed and handed to some players that recirculate it where they see fit. It's as "needed" as the government paying you to dig and fill curves.
Yes. About 20 years ago, I was to a family reunion, with (almost) all of the descendants of my maternal grandmother's parents. We were over a hundred: mmm and mmf had 9 children, who all lived, all got married and all had at least two children, many had more. The next generation did well too.
Many years later I got into family history, and looked into what happened to mmm's sister, who emigrated to the US. Turns out she had six children, but only four lived up, no one had more than two children, and her last descendant died during covid. It's technically possible there are descendants of course, but then they're "off the books" and would have been unknown to that last guy who died.
mmm's three other siblings too have no descendants - one moved to US, fought in WW1 and died a bachelor at over 100, the two others died shortly after age 18, both in drowning accidents.
So, even back when fertility was much higher, just because you had children and grandchildren didn't mean you'd have descendants a few generations further down.
And nothing Ukraine can decide to do on its own.
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