• 11 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Like… I am not going to say I am NOT surprised.

    But it really does make sense if you look at history as a whole. Catholicism has largely always been characterized by a religious third party meddling in politics, economics, and the legal system. When they have a critical mass of Believers, they are a force to be feared. When they don’t? They are a nagging voice that world leaders are expected to kiss the ring of.

    In this case? Somehow the catholic church is NOT the most evil voice in the room which… is a whole level of fucked.

    But England broke with the pope centuries ago. And people forget that the US was “founded” by protestants. Or that the country is basically controlled by evangelical christofacists (another flavor of protestants). Like… it is STILL a big deal that JFK was openly catholic.

    So… in a lot of ways? This is one fallen empire that pissed away its soft power getting mocked by the figurehead of a falling empire that pissed away its soft power.





  • Pointing out that the US spends massive amounts of money on military spending is just a fact. https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/finance/def-exp-2025-en.pdf is the official NATO write up of this from last year and the only countries that outspend the US (as a percentage of their GDP) tend to be the countries that are where The War will kick off Poland) or… countries with other things going on

    And keep in mind that is in terms of GDP percentages and how massive the US’s economy was for most of that period.

    The “conservative” talking point is not: “The US spends money on war while the EU spends money on healthcare and actually giving a shit about its population”. It is “The US spends money on war so you should do whatever we want”. Its also worth understanding that The EU did not spend that money anywhere near that altruistically but it doesn’t change the situation that the EU/NATO finds itself in.

    Because when that military is increasingly likely to be the aggressor? You need to rapidly start making guns and revisiting what is required of your populace. People have exploded over Germany recently more or less codifying a standing policy but… there is a reason politicians are looking at their conscription laws.

    Look. We all live in a content bubble. But if you actually want to understand the world, rather than just get angry in ways that are convenient to influencers and politicians, actually look at statistics and respond to facts. Rather than getting pissy and screaming “fake news” because you don’t’ like what you saw.

    Because, to be clear, I REALLY don’t fucking like how broken the US is because of how much it spends on the military.






  • Because, for decades prior, the US was the military of NATO. The US pumped massive percentages of its GDP into maintaining a standing military while most of NATO focused more on social programs with comparatively minimal military spending.

    And threats like russia wouldn’t attack out of fear of having to fight said militarized nation. Whereas now there is a very clear window where the nations that might stand up against them are rebuilding. “Fortunately” russia is stretched pretty far by a failed invasion of Ukraine but… go read the wikipedia article on how their previous invasions of Ukraine went.


    Welp. The Internet as a whole is real broken. But Lemmy is very rapidly taking the cake for THE place where you can never discuss anything and the only responses are people who are incapable of having a conversation and are just angry that you didn’t say what they wanted to hear.

    Dead Internet Theory looking increasingly not that bad. Or, better yet, prioritizing different social media where people respond to each other rather than the voices in their own heads. Somehow… we managed to actually leap frog reddit on the way down?





  • “aren’t making a profit” gets into the mess that is book keeping and is a giant rabbit hole people actively avoid because it is just easier to get angry at stupidity rather than complex malfeasance.

    But what makes something an “AI data center” outside of the branding?

    The reality is that it is a shit ton of computers connected to a really fast internet connection. Preferably through a properly managed set of switches but you do you. And the reason that we still mostly use GPUs for “AI” rather than highly specialized hardware (although, nvidia DID just buy groq a few months back…) is for that reason. They might do linear algebra of quarter precision floats REALLY well but they also do linear algebra of single and double precision floats pretty well too. And the CPUs and mobos (that are mostly optimized for data movement to offload to said GPUs) are no slouches either.

    Which is what most of these companies are planning for. openai is, arguably, really fucking stupid. Whereas anthropic have shown decent signs of “diversifying” as it were. And nvidia… if we lived in a world where they could get enough RAM I think they would be fine. As it stands… Jensen (and a LOT of people) are kinda fucked and I expect to see a hard pivot over the next 12 months.

    Because if we banned ALL generative AI tomorrow? The people who think you can’t use a computer without installing litellm first are gonna be fucked. But everyone else will just put other workloads on there and be… “fine” is a strong word but they won’t go bankrupt. And the data centers themselves will still be incredibly valuable.


  • Think about the dotcom bubble. We went from having all of these businesses that shot to the moon for valuation… and then it collapsed.

    Amazon and Google and basically all of FAANG/MAMA beg to differ.

    And basically every company still has a website and ecommerce in general is still massive.

    The Dot Com bubble was brutal. But it was not a collapse of the industry. It was much more of a correction after so many companies blew up to sell services like “rate my dog” and many of the smaller ecommerce sites were absorbed by larger ones.

    And that is likely what will happen with generative AI. I expect a MUCH bigger bloodbath for openai but anthropic seem to have scaled a lot better (although they also are going into their IPO with a massive data breach…). But expect most of the smaller companies to similarly get gutted.

    But

    Makes sense. It takes years to complete construction projects and budgets always overrun. AI is a fad for most companies trying to get into it.

    Data Centers exploding… honestly have little to do with AI. No… not the way they explode in the UAE… metaphorical exploding. The reality is that data centers are GOOD money. Basically every company needs data hosting and offloading internal infrastructure is… honestly a really smart play. Same with the massive push for streaming of basically everything so that nobody owns anything and subscribe to everything. You want regional data centers and… this is how you get them.


  • Saying “I don’t care what you do, not my problem” is very much losing “moral authority”.

    For decades (really centuries but…), The West (Western Europe and North America and the paler parts of Oceania) have claimed to be the moral arbiters of the world. Much of colonialism was built around the idea of “civilizing” savages. And many of the wars (cold and otherwise) of the 20th century were similarly built around this.

    The US is speedrunning the erosion of any form of credibility or high ground. But The West as a whole aren’t that far behind. But the “good” news is that this is nothing new? NOBODY cared about Palestine until it got caught in the news cycle a few years back (and the Uyghurs, among others, can pound sand because anything else might hurt the supply chain). And there is a reason we all expected the most recent War in Ukraine to end with russia murdering a bunch of people, stealing more land, and doing it again in another decade.

    Because intervening would have been messy.


  • Gun “finerprinting” is and isn’t bullshit.

    The reality is that for a given configuration of a gun, you do get some rather distinct markings on a bullet. It is less “We can 100% determine this bullet was fired by this bigoted dipshit’s gun so let’s hand it to him so he can dramatically show he took the firing pin out” but you can get within a pretty high level of confidence.

    Unless… the shooter cleaned their gun. Even just field stripping can often be enough. Let alone if they actually remove the firing pin and reinstall it (not even replacing).

    So it is not useful if someone escaped for days and nobody could find them until they got narced on. It IS useful if you catch them on their way home and they don’t know to do this.

    But also? it depends on the bullet being intact. Which, as mentioned above, is not often the case for stuff like 5.56 in soft tissue.