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Trump thinks Putin is his friend. The Russians just issued a humiliating statement to the contrary.
  • I'm not a master diplomat but this is negotiation 101: don't look too keen to negotiate, start from a position of strength.

    Trump's opening offer was to allow Putin to keep whatever he's managed to invade and, by most accounts, Russia is now gaining territory again. Plus, Trump is clearly not so keen to continue supporting Ukraine militarily and economically (not to speak of his stance on NATO) and in Europe we are weak, divided and also increasingly voting for our own small versions of Trump (Trumpets?). Put these things together and why would Putin get all chummy and sit down to negotiate now? He's signaling strength and taking a position of "YOU want to end this war, not me, so if you want me to stop, you better come begging and bringing gifts".

  • Elon Musk Dragged After His Own Chatbot Admits He's A 'Significant Spreader' Of Misinformation
  • I don't think Musk would disagree with that definition and I bet he even likes it.

    The key word here is "significant". That's the part that clearly matters to him, based on his actions. I don't care about the man and I don't think he's a genius, but he does not look stupid or delusional either.

    Musk spreads disinformation very deliberately for the purpose of being significant. Just as his chatbot says.

  • Russia faces a wave of bankruptcies as borrowing costs skyrocket
  • I keep seeing news that the Russian economy is perfectly fine.... no, wait it's in shambles... no it's actually even better than before.... no, people can't even find bread.... no, sanctions are killing it.... and so on. And this is not even from different sources; different articles on the same (I hope reputable) sources.

    I know that it's hard to get a read of these things even when not in the middle of a war with lots of disinformation happening on both sides. And I also know that indicators of the economy are tricky to read and often in contradiction. But these swings are so extreme that I don't know what to make of these articles any longer.

  • Volodymyr Zelenskyy urges allies to stop just ‘watching’ amid North Korea threat
  • Russia and Ukraine are two countries that have thrown everything they had at each other: from good soldiers, to inmates, to good people who'd probably never held a weapon before.

    At this point I imagine that having troops who are alive and actual trained soldiers, not emotionally and physically drained (if not outright mutilated) by years of fighting is a big advantage

    If I was taken from my home and suddenly sent to fight for my country, no matter how full of patriotic love I might be, one North Korean child with a knife would be enough to take me out.

  • Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves
  • I think I'm with him on this one. Replacing all the people on social with AI agents would give us back so much free time! And we could even restart socializing for real.

    Go on Zuckerberg, give us a Facebook made only of AI agents creating fake pictures of inexistent gatherings and posting them, so other AIs can recommend them and million of other AIs can comment on them!

    You are an unsung hero, Zuckerberg, but one day they'll understand and thank you

  • Kamala Harris 'is in control of this hurricane' using 'weather weapons': Alex Jones
  • can confirm (source: am on the other side of the ocean and certified idiot). But this is beyond even my level of idiocy. The part on 9/11 is really the icing on this shit cake: he manages to pit two conspiracies against each other:

    • hey man, what are you doing with that hurricane? Today we are doing the "flying airplanes into towers" one, remember?
    • oh shit sorry, totally forgot that one! No worries, I'm just turning this thing off before it hits the coast
  • Would you trust AI to scan your genitals for STIs?
  • I'm not sure we, as a society, are ready to trust ML models to do things that might affect lives. This is true for self-driving cars and I expect it to be even more true for medicine. In particular, we can't accept ML failures, even when they get to a point where they are statistically less likely than human errors.

    I don't know if this is currently true or not, so please don't shoot me for this specific example, but IF we were to have reliable stats that everything else being equal, self-driving cars cause less accidents than humans, a machine error will always be weird and alien and harder for us to justify than a human one.

    "He was drinking too much because his partner left him", "she was suffering from a health condition and had an episode while driving"... we have the illusion that we understand humans and (to an extent) that this understanding helps us predict who we can trust not to drive us to our death or not to misdiagnose some STI and have our genitals wither. But machines? Even if they were 20% more reliable than humans, how would we know which ones we can trust?

  • What’s the most overhyped tech trend right now?
  • Most things to do with Green Energy. Don't get me wrong, I think solar panels or wind turbines are great. I just think that most of the reported figures are technically correct but chosen to give a misleadingly positive impression of the gains.

    Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity

  • Tim Walz is giving MAGA a master class in manhood
  • and Trump would just... "your beer? Haven't seen it. There's just MY two glasses of beer here. A great beer, the greatest. My uncle invented beer, Fred Budweiser Trump. Great IQ, very good genes!"

  • why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?

    I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don't want to send traffic to Reddit.

    What do you think?

    > > I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don't mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven't seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back. > > If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there's no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven't seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees ("we've seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home" or "project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination" wouldn't make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team) > > Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like "we value the power of working together". Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space? > > On the side of employees, I often see arguments like "these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don't want to look stupid by leaving them empty". But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can't believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.

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